STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Monday, 20 October 2014

[Demeter]

17. Why the U.S. Is Building a High-Tech Bubonic Plague Lab in Kazakhstan

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-the-us-is-building-a-high-tech-plague-lab-in-kazakhstan

...When it opens in September 2015, the $102-million project laboratory is meant to serve as a Central Asian way station for a global war on dangerous disease. And as a project under that Pentagon program, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the lab will be built, and some of its early operation funded, by American taxpayers.

The far-flung biological threat reduction lab may look like a strange idea at a time of various sequester outbreaks, but officials say it's an important anti-terror investment, a much-needed upgrade to a facility that has been described as an aging, un-secure relic of the 1950's, and one that the Defense Dept. fears can't keep pace in an era of WMD.

It's also an investment, they add, in a country where scientists are hungry for more international participation and better facilities—and where the U.S. is keen to keep sensitive materials and knowledge in the right hands and brains....