Terrorism Ruled out in Siberian Ebola Case

[Lori Price CLG]

Terrorism Ruled out in Siberian Ebola Case

A special commission from Russia's Health Ministry, investigating a deadly Ebola case in Siberia, has confirmed that that the death of an expert was the result of an accident, and ruled out terrorism or foul play, the Interfax news agency reported.

An expert at the Vector Virology and Biotechnology institute in Novosibirsk pricked her finger with a needle on May 5 while injecting guinea-pigs with the Ebola virus — possibly the most feared disease in the world .

She came down with a hemorrhagic fever and died weeks later at a special hospital ward for infectious diseases.

<snip>

Lori Price
http://www.legitgov.org/

[lapfog_1]

1. Holy crap

1. Novosibirsk is where that plane from Israel that was accidentally
shot down with 5 world class microbiologists aboard in Oct 2001
was destined.

http://www.rense.com/general20/mic.htm

2. Could the Russians be working on weaponizing Ebola? That would
be a disaster of the first order.

Course, they could be trying to find a vaccine or a cure... but Ebola
isn't all that widespread, outbreaks are few and far between. There
are many other hemorrhagic fevers that are more common. Ebola would
not be my first choice to work on UNLESS I wanted to weaponize it
OR I had evidence that someone else HAD weaponized it. (and now I
refer you back to #1).

[NickB79]

3. Weaponizing Ebola: there already is an airborne strain known

Look up some info on Ebola Reston, discovered in a primate facility in Reston, Virginia. It was highly contagious amongst the monkeys in the facility, with virtually 100% kill rate. They determined that it was airborne because monkeys were dying in rooms in opposite wings of the building, connected only by ventiliation shafts. The miraculous thing was that this particular strain of Ebola is non-lethal in humans. Four men who worked at the facility were later tested and found positive for exposure to the Reston strain of Ebola, but without any symptoms.

With current biotechnology, it wouldn't be that hard to sequence the genetic codes of the Ebola Reston and the highly lethal Ebola Sudan strains, isolate genes likely to confer airborne infection routes from Ebola Reston, and splice them into the Ebola Sudan strain. Hell, you could probably simply infect test animals (or human test subjects) with both forms of the virus at once and let natural gene swapping between the two take place as they both reproduce in the same cells. Sooner or later an airborne strain would emerge naturally.

[lapfog_1]

4. Yeah, but

there's a bit more to it than that for it to be an effective WMD.
You need something which can be safely transported while remaining
lethal, then it has to survive the dispersal process (spraying
via crop duster or explosive cannister), and, ideally, you would
like it to spread from the index patient to the next without losing
potency, and so on.

Of course, Tom Clancy wrote a book on this exact subject (Executive
Orders), which just happens to be the same book that starts with
terrorists flying planes into a joint session of Congress (SOTU).
As I recall, he pinned it on the Iranians... who took advantage
of the terrorist attack to take over Iraq and then executed the
Ebola attack on the US. I always thought the Anthrax thing right
after 9/11 was someone trying to emulate what they read in that
book.

Anyway, it seems doubtful that someone would take out the scientist
in this method, UNLESS she can't remember the needle stick that
infected her and they just assume she did it to herself by accident.

But the question remains, what are our Russian friends up to with
Ebola? I doubt there has ever been a case (other than ones like
this one) of Ebola in Russia. I'm guess that they, much like we
are here, are working on vaccines for Ebola because they worry that
someone WILL weaponize the damn thing. Ebola has been around a very
long time, and villagers in Africa that encounter it have, for the
most part, an effective way to deal with it (basically, they don't
let any strangers into their village... period. Then, if their
village doesn't have Ebola, it won't get Ebola, if it does, pretty
much everyone dies). We've changed that with Dependant trade,
non-self sufficiency, more roads, faster transport. Not to mention
that more people are living deeper in the jungle, so the chance
to be infected by the animal carrier (whatever it is, I believe
they STILL can't be sure) is greater. Ebola is nasty... and a
horrible way to die, but AIDS is much worse, simply because if you
get Ebola, within a week at most, you are very sick. So the number
of other people you can infect is fairly limited. AIDS can take
years and years... though the route of transmission is much harder.
Anyway, weaponized Ebola is one of the worst things I can imagine.
But I just have the sinking feeling...

[shadu]

6. thank you for the realistic perspective

despair despair

[Zynx]

8. Read my other post (#7)

The Soviets most likely already did weaponize the bastard as part of Biopreperat. They also may well have made some worse things.

As I said in the other post, no one really knows what they did. But more than a few people involved in the program have mentioned research in the Ebola family.

[hang a left]

2. Is this another dead microbiologist?

Ebola? God help us all!

[hang a left]

5. I am gonna kick this.

I read this late last night, and forgot about it today until I just checked "my posts".

[Zynx]

7. This is nothing new

The Soviets had the most fearsome bioweapons program in human history. And, like USAMRIID, they didn't get rid of any of it when the Cold War ended.

Frankly, no one knows exactly what they engineered, but both airborne Ebola and "blackpox", which is Ebola spliced with smallpox and supposedly spreads like the latter while killing like the former, have been suggested as ultimate bioweapons they perfected.

Ebola makes a difficult bioweapon to use in its raw form because it, like AIDS, is a bit of a wimp as regards exposure to normal atmosphere. Ebola Reston was unusual in that it did spread from room to room.

[robcon]

9. The Hot Zone was a great book on Ebola.

It described the "luck" that the Reston virus wasn't harmful to humans. This is scary stuff.