Monday, June 13, 2005

Biowarfare and "domestic violence"

Last week the body of Dr Leonid Strachunsky, described as "World Health Organization expert and head of the anti-microbe Therapy Research Institute," was found in his Moscow hotel room. He had arrived from Smolensk, en route to the United States, and died of blunt-force trauma to the head. (Some stories identify the murder weapon as a champagne bottle.) His laptop and mobile phone were missing.

According to MosNews, "some sources link Wednesday’s murder of...Strachunsky, who specialized in creating microbes resistant to biological weapons, to [a] hepatitis outbreak" which, according to the latest report, has afflicted more than 500 people in Russia's Tver region. However, a Moscow police source tells Interfax that the murder was "probably domestic violence."

There's likely no intentionality behind the hepatitis outbreak. The Tver governor is probably right; it's nothing but "tainted food," just as last winter 120 children in North Ossetia were likely accidentally poisoned by contaminated milk, and the drops of mercury that Russians have found in fruit juice and candy are presumably isolated incidents of industrial sabotage. But there should be a degree of uncertainty about such stories in every nation that conducts bioweapons research, because its purpose is to hone the kill potential of the natural world, and researchers' test subjects have often been their fellow citizens.

Americans should know this. That most still don't - or do and don't care - makes me wonder, and not merely figuratively, what they're putting in the water.

And in the air, even. In the Fall of 1999, field tests began for a vaccine developed by OraVax Corporation, under license to the Army biowarfare lab at Fort Detrick (from which the anthrax of the attacks of 2001 was sourced), to a genetically-altered Japanese encephalitis virus the Army had created. Coincidentally encephalitis, in the form of West Nile Virus, also broke out in New York City.

Leonard Horowitz, in Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare, cites the conclusions of researcher Patricia Doyle that "the sudden emergence of WNV, never before a public concern, was likely a deliberate release to 'test that city's biowarfare response, and make at least one corporation a sizable profit.'" (One year before becoming the exclusive manufacturer of WNV vaccine, OraVax had been delisted by NASDAQ, and was facing insolvency.)

From Richard Jannaccio's Selling the West Nile Virus Vaccine:

The firm's track record should have disqualified them from the get go. But with a vice president such as [Colonel Tom] Monath, whose resume includes impressive stints with both the Army [former biowarfare research scientist]and federal Centers for Disease Control, the pipeline to the federal trough seems well secured. Col. Monath, who wears the hat of an unbiased advisor to Giuliani on the WNV epidemic, was also one of seven scientists who met with President Bill Clinton on April 10, 1998 to urge the stockpiling of vaccines against bioweapons - another policy from which Monath's company had hoped to profit handsomely.

While a Newsday article of September 29, 1999 wonders why WNV had "suddenly and inexplicably emerged in humans or animals in the Western Hemisphere," it also states, matter of factly, that "the virus has for decades made its home in several US research laboratories...including Rockefeller University in Manhattan and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In fact, investigators there were the first to grow and study the WNV in the United States. the work began in the 1950s when unidentified viral samples from around the world arrived at Rockefeller University on a steady basis."

I don't know whether West Nile Virus was intentionally introduced. But if it was, it's an old story, told often. In 1977 the Senate heard that, between 1949 and 1969, 239 "populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents." And it's older than that. In `931 Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the aegis of the Rockefeller Institute (there's that name again), was intentionally infecting Puerto Rican subjects with cancer cells.

Perhaps the most famous American case of experimentation - and I believe that, too, is intentional - is the Tuskegee syphilis study. It's interesting to consider why this, of all the others, receives the most official acknowledgement and profuse mea culpas. Two reasons come to mind. First, the crime of Tuskegee was of omission (the withholding of care) and not of commission (the purposeful infection of patients), so the amorality does not appear to rise to the level of Nazi science, making an institutional apology on the order of "What were we thinking?" more palatable. And second, since the subjects were Black Americans, a subliminal message is sent to America's whites that they needn't themselves worry about becoming unwitting guinea pigs, even though they have been, and likely still are.

So long as biological warfare research persists, we cannot presume a natural pathology for emerging diseases. We can no longer trust nature to be merely natural.

Even if the Moscow police source is credible, and Strachunsky's killing was likely "not in any way related to the work of the anti-microbe Therapy Research Institute," biowarfare research has always been characterized by domestic violence of a sort.

14 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Kind of interesting how so many Biowarfare Scientists have died since 2001 eh?

If it wasn't for that, I'd probably believe it was a robbery and of course it probably was a robbery anyway. But who knows.

7:45 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here's a link on the other Bioscientists that have mysteriously passed on.

According to my math (it's late for me, and I may have missed one or two), counting Dr. Strachunsky, 29 Bioscientists have died since 2001.

It's an Epidemic!

8:00 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Maybe someone(s) is trying to slow down the research. Who knows.
The slower the better.

1:01 p.m.  
Blogger ziz said...

Approx 24 months ago Nature headlined a story about Alexander dying of WNV in Baghdad quoting Petrarch's story about ravens crowing....etc

I was puzzled and followed this up as of course WNV was not described ubtil after WWII.

The researchers were using some fancy datbase that diagnosed disease - I chased this with Nature who were very sniffy. I followed up with the authors who agreed lamely that the database diagnosis was flu, but when they put in birds it came up with WNV. THis was rsearch that was credited at CDC in Atlanta.

Thye promised to follow this up and punlish an explanation.

Nature finally just ignored me.

I cannot readily find the references as they were on a hard disk which has seized up - if any one is interested. A suitable keyword search would find it.

Anyone very interested contact me at zizania@gmail.com

Just idle speculation but would someone like to build up WNV as a very well established illness in the Middle East ?

2:02 p.m.  
Blogger ziz said...

Hi I found the reference on a quick search - yes they were CDC people. http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:0xr3wtJMDiYJ:www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no12/03-0288.htm+alexander+west+nile+virus&hl=en&client=firefox-a%20target=nw

Worth pursuing.

2:06 p.m.  
Blogger ziz said...

This was the Nature ref but it is by subscription but I have a cache of it.

Trying to find the e-mails

http://www.nature.com/nsu/031124/031124-11.html

2:16 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

For anyone who hasn't read this, here's a good book about human experimentation.

The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments In The Cold War by Eileen Welsome

Amazon Review:
It was these plutonium guinea pigs that set journalist Eileen Welsome on her decade-long search to expose this grisly chapter of America's atomic age, a feat that would earn her the Pulitzer Prize. In the impressively thorough and compelling Plutonium Files, Welsome recounts her work with a reporter's gift for description, characterizing early radiation researchers as "a curious blend of spook, scientist, and soldier," tirelessly interviewing survivors and their families, and providing social and political context for a complex and far-reaching scandal. Perhaps most damning is that not only did these cold-war experiments violate everything from the Hippocratic Oath to the Nuremberg Code, Welsome reveals, they were often ill-conceived, inconclusive, and repetitive--"they were not just immoral science, they were bad science." --Paul Hughes

From Publishers Weekly
In a deeply shocking and important expos?, Welsome takes the lid off the thousands of secret, government-sponsored radiation experiments performed on unsuspecting human "guinea pigs" at U.S. hospitals, universities and military bases during the Cold War. This riveting report greatly expands on Welsome's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1994 articles in the Albuquerque Tribune, which told how 18 men, women and children scattered in hospital wards across the country were injected with plutonium by U.S. Army and Manhattan Project doctors between 1945 and 1947. As Welsome demonstrates, the scope of the government's radiation experimentation program went much further. She documents how, between 1951 and 1962, the army, navy and air force used military troops in flights through radioactive clouds, "flashblindness" studies and tests to measure radio-isotopes in their body fluids. Additionally, she reveals that cancer patients were subjected to total-body irradiation, and women, children, the poor, minorities, prisoners and the mentally disabled were targeted for radio-isotope "tracer" studies, frequently without their consent and in some cases suffering excruciating side effects and premature deaths. In 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary launched a campaign to make public all documents relating to the experiments, which had been kept secret. Welsome cogently argues that O'Leary's efforts resulted in a Republican vendetta that led to her ouster. Written with commendable restraint, this engrossing narrative draws liberally on declassified memos, briefings, phone calls, interviews and medical records to convey the enormity of the irradiation program and the bad science behind the flawed and dangerous testsAand to document the government's systematic cover-up. Anyone who cares about America's history, moral health and future should read this book. 8-city author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

5:06 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

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one hit wondar white crossover trash rapstar stardom here i'msa' comin!

9:26 p.m.  
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