Bidding for Biohazards: The Madness of Bushenomics

[marmar]

from CounterPunch, via AlterNet:



Bidding for Biohazards: The Madness of Bushenomics

By Stan Cox, CounterPunch. Posted March 29, 2008.

Five states are locked in fierce competition over a proposed bioterror lab host to the world's most feared human and animal pathogens.



What would it take to convince you that your town should play host to the world's most feared human and animal pathogens? Believe it or not, five states are locked in fierce competition over a proposed bioterror lab that would have them doing just that.

In 2002, the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was given control of Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York. Now DHS is seeking a home in the heartland for a National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) that would take over Plum Island's work, along with its potent microbial cultures. The fact that many diseases are now known to jump between humans and animals, combined with this decade's terror-fixation, has led the federal government to convert the agricultural problem of sick livestock into the national-security problem of bioterrorism.

Do I hear a bid?

Lying off the east end of New York's Long Island, Plum Island (which was under the Department of Agriculture until 2002) is the only place in the nation where scientists have previously been allowed to handle the pathogens that cause foot-and-mouth disease, rinderpest, Rift Valley fever, African swine fever, and other horrific maladies that, if let loose on the mainland, could cause billions in agricultural losses and even threaten human populations.

NBAF will be a "biosafety level 4" (BL-4) facility, providing the highest degree of isolation for the world's most dangerous organisms (Plum Island was one notch down, at BL-3, because it was isolated by water). Locations being eyed as possible sites include the University of Georgia campus in Athens; the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan; Flora, Mississippi, near the capital city of Jackson; a research farm 17 miles northeast of Duke University in North Carolina; and a former ranch near San Antonio, Texas. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/80576/

[Demeter]

1. An Island Makes a Lot More Sense

so of course, nobody will propose one.

[crikkett]

2. consider rising sea levels in the next few decades.

I personally wouldn't take a job that risked my life in such a way, but someone has to study pathogens.

[Demeter]

3. There are some pretty tall islands--extinct volcanoes, for instance

Complete with big physical barriers to keep all the nasties confined away from the sea...