USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ebola crisis rekindles concerns about secret research.....(Washington Post) October 24

And the U.S. ebola bioweapons program..... No concerns?

GE

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WASHINGTON POST
Ebola crisis rekindles concerns about secret
research in Russian military labs

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The Siberian complex known as Vector was a top Soviet research facility for bioweapons. Today, its scientists study defenses against Ebola and other pathogens.
A lab worker accidentally contracted Ebola in 2004 while working on vaccines. (Joby Warrick/The Washington Post)

By Joby Warrick<http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/joby-warrick>

October 24 at 8:00 AM

She was an ordinary lab technician with an uncommonly dangerous assignment: drawing blood from Ebola-infected animals in a secret military laboratory. When she

cut herself at work one day, she decided to keep quiet, fearing she'd be in trouble. Then the illness struck.

"By the time she turned to a doctor for help, it was too late," one of her overseers, a former bio-weapons scientist, said of the accident years afterward. The woman died

quickly and was buried, according to one account, in a "sack filled with calcium hypochlorite," or powdered bleach.

The 1996 incident might have been forgotten except for the pathogen involved -- a highly lethal strain of Ebola virus -- and where the incident occurred: inside

a restricted Russian military lab that was once part of the Soviet Union's biological weapons program<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/russiagov/stories/disclose022698.htm>. Years ago, the same facility in the Moscow suburb of

Sergiev Posad cultivated microbes for use as tools of war. Today, much of what goes on in the lab remains unknown.

The fatal lab accident and a similar one in 2004 offer a rare glimpse into a 35-year history of Soviet and Russian interest in the Ebola virus.

The research began amid intense secrecy with an ambitious effort to assess Ebola's potential as a biological weapon, and it later included

attempts to manipulate the virus's genetic coding, U.S. officials and researchers say. ......................................................................................................



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