....Just thinking how easy it would be......something like a movie:
1. The Satan Bug
2. Andromeda Strain
Seems like I remember a Legionnaire's outbreak some years ago traced to contaminated/moldy filters on air conditioners in retirement homes. Somebody could have grown this stuff in a lab and then contaminated the fountain with it(?). Just trying to think like Alistair MacLean (author of "The Satan Bug") here is all.
I am no "germ-a-phobe," but........maybe ya'll should take a read of this...Life imitating "art" so to speak:
Virulent biological weapons a deadly Cold War hangover
Date: August 10 2012
Details have emerged of Soviet Union plague warfare plans, writes Joby Warrick in Washington.
IN THE Soviet playbook for all-out war with the United States, the wasting of US cities by nuclear bombs was to be followed by something equally horrifying: waves of plagues to kill any survivors.
Soviet scientists spent decades preparing for the second attack, concocting new kinds of biological weapons more lethal than any ever invented.
None of these weapons were used during the Cold War, but a new book suggests the dangers posed by the program never completely abated. The authors reveal new details about the deadly achievements of Soviet weapons scientists - from multiple-drug resistant anthrax to ''stealth'' bugs that elude detection - and they say the strains probably still exist inside the freezers of military laboratories inside Russia.
The book also suggests that US intelligence operatives may have inadvertently fuelled the Soviets' experimentation with germ warfare, in part by spreading false stories that convinced communist leaders the US was also secretly making such weapons after its program was officially halted in 1969.
At minimum, Soviet officials appear to have increased production of an anthrax weapon because they falsely believed that the US was doing the same, contend the authors of The Soviet Biological Weapons Program, an exhaustively researched, 890-page history of the Soviet Union's 65-year effort to develop the tools for germ warfare. ''It may have led to the massive expansion of the Soviet b. anthracis program,'' write Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas, who interviewed some of the Soviet Union's former top bioweaponeers during more than a decade of research for the book.
Russia maintains a policy of official denial with regard to Soviet-era production of bioweapons, which were banned by an international treaty signed by the Soviet Union in 1972. But former Russian president Boris Yeltsin confirmed the existence of a secret Soviet program to top US officials in the early 1990s, and since then defectors, former Soviet scientists, US officials and journalists have published extensive accounts.
They also shed light on the 1979 industrial accident in a bioweapons plant in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, in which anthrax spores spread through a residential area, killing at least 68 people.
Among the revelations by Leitenberg and Zilinskas is an account of a largely successful Soviet effort to engineer deadly new strains, such as drug-resistant forms of the bacteria that cause anthrax.
Soviet scientists also learnt to alter microbes to give them stealthy characteristics, the authors say. The bacteria that cause plague, for instance - Yersina pestis - were modified so that standard medical tests could not detect an infection until the disease had progressed to an advanced stage.
Similar changes were made to a strain of the bacteria that cause Legionnaire's disease. In the altered state, the bacteria would stimulate the body's immune response to conceal symptoms of the disease, while simultaneously secreting a toxin that attacks a critical component of the nervous system known as myelin.
Despite such achievements, the Soviet program suffered from deficiencies and gaps, including a failure to perfect delivery vehicles such as missile warheads.
The gaps suggest that Soviet leaders were conflicted over how and when to use such weapons. One theory, explored by the authors, is that biological weapons were ''developed not for military purposes, but for sabotage or terrorism''.
Despite repeated requests, Russian officials have refused to allow outside access to three biological laboratories operated by the Defence Ministry.
Reference Link:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/virulent-biological-weapons-a-deadly-cold-war-hangover-20120809-23x0f.html?skin=text-only
11 replies
3rd death tied to Chicago Legionnaires' outbreak (Original post)
marmar (60,938 posts) 
