Foot and Mouth Outbreak Linked to Foot and Mouth Lab
August 5th, 2007Via: Sky:
The foot and mouth outbreak at a farm in Surrey may have been caused by a leak from a nearby animal research laboratory.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)said the virus is the same as one being used at Pirbright Laboratory, just a few miles from the farm.
Defra could not say definitely if the laboratory was the source of the disease, but immediately increased the size of the protection zones covering farms in the area.
Experts said the strain was not one recently found in animals, but was similar to ones used in diagnostic laboratories and vaccine production.
In a statement, Defra said: “The present indications are that this strain is a 01 BFS67-like virus, isolated in the 1967 foot and mouth disease outbreak in Great Britain.”
The strain is present at the Pirbright site’s Institute of Animal Health and was used in a vaccine batch manufactured last month, Defra said.
A Conservative Party spokesman said: “If there is evidence that this outbreak has come out of Pirbright Laboratory, a full inquiry into the laboratory’s bio-security must be carried out urgently and immediately.”
My plug is for planned coincidence. If you arrange for enough labs to be studying enough deadly toxins/diseases (For humanitarian reasons of course) there’s bound to be something go wrong eventually. All you (elite person) have to do is fund humanitarian medical research.
Even if it doesn’t work you might learn more about diseases/toxins etc (in case you do have to actually arrange for their release) and if that doesn’t happen you’ll probably make a profit somehow and if that doesn’t work there is still the PR value.
Talk about a win – win – win – win situation.
It is so nice to know that American biotech companies on foreign soils cares next to nothing about biosafety. It makes life so easy to live in Central London to know that there are other American biotech companies around the area.