Sorry, but, do you **really** think the US Government/DoD has stopped
producing biological weapons?? Right. And be out on the most effective
form of warfare yet.. yeah, sure.
>
> Rohit
>
> ------- Forwarded Message
> [Via IP]
> Date: Mon, 02 Mar 1998 22:34:45 -0500
> From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
>
>
> The New Yorker magazine of March 9 has a long shattering
> essay on Ken Alibek, the former Soviet bioweapons expert,
> William Patrick, the US's counterpart, the state of Russian
> secret bioweapons development, and prospects for the spread
> and use of this WMD.
>
> It's far more disturbingly detailed than the New York Times
> and ABC PrimeTime reports, and presents a horrific spectrum of
> gruesome details of nearly unimaginable catastrophe fermenting
> in secret laboratories and deepest black storage tanks.
>
> If you thought nuclear weapons were terrifying, read this for a
> shocking introduction to evil which will give even thermonuclear
> warriors nightmares of helplessness.
>
> Where Strangelovian physicists once ruled, now reign Mad
> microbiologists.
>
> Richard Preston is the writer, featured on PrimeTime and
> author of The Hot Zone, on the Ebola virus.
>
> For those without easy access to the magazine we offer a
> copy:
>
> http://jya.com/bioweap.htm (62K)
>
>
> ------- End of Forwarded Message
>
>
> The deadliest natural smallpox virus is known as Variola major. Natural
> smallpox was eradicated
> from the earth in 1977, when the last human case of it appeared, in Somalia.
> Since then, the virus
> has lived only in laboratories. Smallpox is an extremely lethal virus, and it
> is highly contagious in
> the air. When a child with chicken pox appears in a school classroom, many or
> most of the children
> in the class may go on to catch chicken pox. Smallpox is as contagious as
> chicken pox. One case of
> smallpox can give rise to twenty new cases. Each of those cases can start
> twenty more. In 1970,
> when a man infected with smallpox appeared in an emergency room in Germany,
> seventeen cases
> of smallpox appeared in the hospital on the floors above. Ultimately, the
> German government
> vaccinated a hundred thousand people to stop the outbreak. Two years later in
> Yugoslavia, a man
> with a severe case of smallpox visited several hospitals before dying in an
> intensive-care unit. To
> stop the resulting outbreak, which forced twenty thousand people into
> isolation, Yugoslav health
> authorities had to vaccinate virtually the entire population of the country
> within three weeks.
> Smallpox can start the biological equivalent of a runaway chain reaction.
> About a third of the
> people who get a hot strain of smallpox die of it. The skin puffs up with
> blisters the size of
> hazelnuts, especially over the face. A severe case of smallpox can essentially
> burn the skin off
> one's body.
>
> The smallpox vaccine wears off after ten to twenty years. None of us are
> immune any longer,
> unless we've had a recent shot. There are currently seven million usable doses
> of smallpox
> vaccine stored in the United States, in one location in Pennsylvania. If an
> outbreak occurred here,
> it might be necessary to vaccinate all two hundred and seventy million people
> in the United States
> in a matter of weeks. There would be no way to meet such a demand.
>
>
>
>
_____________________________________________________________
Erika Sherman, esherman@umich.edu
Manager -- Web Support, UM School of Social Work
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