Clement Kpeklitsu
Researchers studying both cellular and viral disease agents in the laboratory have become infected since the early days of microbiology 150 years ago.
However, in the early 21st century, new concerns about bioweapons being used to generate terror and also with a series of newly emerging or newly understood disease-causing microbes have resulted in infections and deaths of workers studying these microbes in the laboratory, generally to gain understanding and to develop treatments and vaccines.
Here, five examples are summarized: (i) smallpox virus escaped from a UK laboratory where it was being maintained and stored, (ii) the 2014 infections and deaths of five researchers who were isolating West African Ebola virus for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing epidemiology studies, (iii) and (iv) two recent infections that happened in the same US laboratory where researchers were infected with agents causing septicemic Yersinia plague and Bacillus anthrax and (v) the 2012 death in California from laboratory infection by Neisseria meningitidis resulting in spinal meningitis.
Beginning March 2014, a devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa caused widespread suffering and damaged fragile public health systems. The nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone were hit hard by the crisis – the deadliest Ebola outbreak in recorded history – with more than 10,000 lives lost. The recent outbreak of Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo occurred last May close to an American laboratory in Uganda near DRC border.
The number of victims was insignificant in comparison with disaster 2014 in West Africa, however several US companies were suggesting that vaccines against this virus were developed by them.
Conspiracy theories that Ebola is bio-weapon created by the West to depopulate Africa refuse to die away. Leaks from within Western establishments and the behavior of these capitalist powers fuel the theories. They are difficult to ignore.
The number of American research laboratories working on protection against bioterrorism has increased from 20 to 400 over the last ten years. Most of these centres appeared in African countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, DRC, Tanzania, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Egypt.
US government agencies have a long history of carrying out allegedly defensive biological warfare research at labs in Liberia and Sierra Leone. This includes the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is now the point agency for managing the Ebola spill-over into the US.
It seems to me, that what we are dealing with here is a biological warfare work that was conducted at the bio-warfare laboratories set up by the USA on the west coast of Africa. And if you look at a map produced by CDC you can see where these laboratories are located. And they are across the heart of Ebola epidemic, at the west coast of Africa. So, I think these laboratories, one or more of them, are the origins of the Ebola epidemic.
Laboratory-acquired viral and bacterial infections in research facilities happen. Although less common than infections of clinical workers handling patient samples, infections of researchers with serious pathogens can lead to death. This is an increasing problem as governments of USA and technically advanced nations have increased research on potential bioterrorism agents and as concerns have grown about capture of such bioweapons by rogue nations and non-government groups.
With all the latest news of the spreading outbreak understandably giving rise to public fear and panic that it is just a plane ride away now, millions if not billions on this planet are pondering whether the African pandemic might be rapidly turning into a global epidemic spreading to every corner of the earth. Of course to reduce these concerns, the World Health Organization (WHO) and US government are busily downplaying the risks to citizens here in North America.
Specific character of Ebola spreading and high lethality of the virus allows to kill people selectively targeting villages, cites or countries. And if a state for a case of unforeseen circumstance already has a developed and tested vaccine then a biological war might be very fast and successful.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) is funding Ebola trials on humans, trials which started just weeks before the Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The reports continue and state that the DoD gave a contract worth $140 million dollars to Tekmira, a canadian pharmaceutical company, to conduct Ebola research. This research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus, which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March.
So developing biological weapons from collecting monstrously lethal specimens of the Ebola virus should come as no surprise. Or when considering this already long and extensive US military history, repeatedly guilty of human slaughter on such mammoth, unprecedented scale, it should not be so shocking to realize the military purpose of Ebola as yet another highly destructive weapon in its vast lethal arsenal could be potentially used to eliminate an enormous segment of this planet’s readily expendable current human population.
In bringing the two Ebola infected Americans back from West Africa to the CDC, in addition to optimizing their survival chance, the other all too obvious explanation is to harvest their Ebola cells for extraction that will then be used to patent the most deadly strain ever known to man. Then for what reason the US needs the patient?
There are two theories worked out, by the way by American experts. One of them describes mass panic after casual virus leakage from laboratories. It’s followed by outbreak of the disease in a city, a country or the world. And it doesn’t even matter that there is no epidemic all.
No doubt the US government is highly invested in Ebola for both potential profits developing a vaccine as well as for a potential “final solution” as a convenient biowarfare global population-killer. Speaking of profits, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals , a pharmacological company appears during the mass hysteria and presents prepared vaccine. The drug is being bought by millions peoples as well as governments and somebody after developing medicine against local virus gets huge benefit.
It’s really not a big jump to suspect that the military has also been doing research on Ebola as a bioweapon. Its stable nature in aerosol make it attractive as a potential biological weapon.” What better place, via the eyes of the U.S. military, to be messing around with such research than Africa? The thinking might go: If there is a misstep with the virus, research blowbacks don’t happen around US civilian populations. There is no smoking gun here, but one can certainly draw dots around the facts that suggest the U.S. military was the bad actor in this Ebola breakout. USA have been using DRC, Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone as an offshore to circumvent the Convention on Biological Weapons and do bio-warfare work.
• This article by columnist Clement Kpeklistu was initially published in Ghana.