What would you call a person who mistakenly loses a sample of one of the… no, THE SECOND (after smallpox) most virulent and historically dangerous diseases? Careless? Malicious? A fool? Something less civil? What if this was the SECOND time he had lost a lethal sample?
The US military has somehow ended up losing samples of the Black Plague, the disease that wiped out 75- 200 million people and some 30-60% 0f Europe.
It was ever contentious just WHY they needed samples of the horrific ailment to begin with, but people simply figured that you had to study the disease to know how to combat it in future. Or, more likely, they were figuring out how to create a target-able weaponized variant that is resilient to antibiotics. We ARE talking about the military, not some science lab. Now they’ve gone and “lost” it.
This was not the first time they made the “mistake”; in May, the military had sent samples of live anthrax to South Korea.
From CNN:
Four lab workers in the United States and up to 22 overseas have been put in post-exposure treatment, a defense official said, following the revelation the U.S. military inadvertently shipped live anthrax samples in the past several days.
CNN learned on Wednesday a Maryland-based lab received the live samples, which prompted an across the board urgent review to see whether any other live anthrax has been shipped.
Officials are concerned because samples left over at the lab in Dugway, Utah, where the samples originated, were tested and determined to contain live agent.
The shipments, thought to be dead, were shipped under less rigorous conditions than the live agent protocol.
NBC News reported that the anthrax was sent via FedEx.
That bombshell revelation came a few months after the CDC ALSO “accidentally” exposed a dozen people to the Ebola virus.
And now, Black Death. From CNN:
The latest investigation started after CDC inspectors found a sample of the plague in a freezer outside of a containment area on August 17 at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland, Cook said…
“That’s the scientific work that’s being done at this particular time, determining exactly what happened there, and whether or not … there was mislabeling,”he said…
Since 1970, there have been anywhere from a few to a few dozen cases of plague every year in the United States, most of them occurring in Western states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
A few thousand people still get infected with the plague every year… but I really don’t think throwing additional samples all over the place is gonna help matters much either… Either the US military has a very low regard for human life (they aren’t even sure how infectious this sample is), or it’s less competent than a sack of bricks… Going on past experience, I’d wager it’s the former.
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LOL you are aware that bubonic plague is endemic in the Southwest US aren’t you? There are several cases each and every year. Also its fairly easily cleared up with modern antibiotics.