From The Danger Room:When the Pentagon needs to handle the deadliest biowarfare threats, it turns to the labs of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Maryland. It's the only place in the American military complex equipped to handle the worst of the worst diseases -- those that have no cure and can are transmissible by air. Which makes it extremely unnerving, that the place had to suspend biodefense research on Friday, "after discovering apparent problems with the system of accounting for high-risk microbes and biomaterials."
That's the scoop from the new ScienceInsider blog, which notes that "the lab has been under intense scrutiny since August, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation named former USAMRIID researcher Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks."
Read more ....
My Comment: The first warnings came last year that nuclear weapons were not being handled properly. News is now filtering about missing nerve gas stockpiles .... maybe. Now .... questions on the handling of biological agents are circulating.
It appears that there is a culture of sloppiness and a lack of accountability on the handling of WMDs. But what is very troubling .... is that the U.S. has one of the best track records in the handling of this stuff. If they have the best .... who has the worse?
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