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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
Plum Island
 Thu Apr 29, 2004 5:50 am
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http://cryptome.org/plum-eyeball.htm
http://www.nypress.com/17/11/news&columns/feature.cfm
"Monster Island"
New York’s Plum Island is a level-4 bioresearch facility. What exactly is going on there?
[Excerpt]
Located just two miles off the tip of Long Island and six miles from the Connecticut coastline, Plum Island is home to a Bio-Safety Level 4 (BSL-4) research facility. The only comparable government facilities in the country are the United States Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, MD, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Plum Island is specifically engaged in the study of zoonotic diseases. Zoonotic diseases are diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans, like West Nile, like Lyme disease. Like Ebola.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture established the research facility there after acquiring the 840-acre island from the military at the end of World War II. The initial charter from Congress mandated the study of animal diseases, particularly foot-and-mouth disease, with an eye toward eradicating these maladies from the nation’s livestock. It seemed an ideal location for such an endeavor: prevailing winds, after all, blow out to sea.
In 1954, the research took a more aggressive turn, with scientists looking to cook up ways to inflict damage on Soviet livestock. The Cuban government alleges that in the 1960s and 70s, bioweapons developed at Plum were deployed against Cuban agriculture, targeting pork, tobacco and sugar cane. Back in 1999, Floyd P. Horn, administrator of the Agriculture Research Service, persuaded President Clinton to include Plum Island in his expanded bioterrorism program based on the possibility of a biological attack on the nation’s agricultural base. Last year the administration of the island’s research facilities was transferred from USDA to the Department of Homeland Security.
The 200-odd employees do not live on the island; they commute from their homes in Connecticut and Long Island. The facility is only accessible by government ferry, and local sailors who have strayed too close have reported being warned off in no uncertain terms by armed military personnel. The diseases being researched do not live exclusively under glass—there are quite a number of infected live animals for study there. Some of these diseases have an incubation period extending for days.
Which means that it is entirely possible for a researcher to be unknowingly infected on a Friday and then spend the weekend cheerfully spreading some hideous plague from the Hamptons to Tribeca. The government claims that there has only been one outbreak on the island—foot-and-mouth in 1978—which they contained by killing all the livestock. They further maintain that there has never been a leak to the mainland. Apparently the first appearance of what we now call Lyme disease a mere 13 miles northeast of the facility falls under the category of coincidence, as does the mysterious and still unexplained appearance of West Nile virus in Long Island and New York City.
Until 1991, all of the employees were federal. During 1991 and ’92, the workforce bifurcated, with many of the jobs being turned over to the private sector, which naturally led to a simmering resentment in the ranks. On August 13, 2002, the resentment came to a full boil and a strike was called: 76 members of the International Union of Operating Engineers walked out at midnight after negotiations on wages and benefits broke down. The union members, employed by a government subcontractor, LB&B Associates, headquartered in Columbia, MD, were responsible for essential support services such as decontamination, waste-water treatment, keeping the generators in working order and other maintenance and safety-oriented occupations. For the duration of the strike, temps were brought in to replace them, the sentinels and technicians of the island’s infrastructure.
By the end of that month, the FBI had been called to the island to investigate allegations of sabotage. It seems that the water pressure on the island fell precipitously, disabling decontamination facilities and the necropsy rooms used to examine dead animals. The union blamed the problem on the inexperienced temporary replacement workers, suggesting that they had not been adequately screened and lacked the training to properly maintain the essential daily activity of the island, let alone handle an emergency. Jacob Bunch, a spokesman for LB&B, refused to comment on the FBI investigation and responded to a New York Times reporter’s query about the replacement workers by stating that "In terms of training, I will tell you that people are well trained or they wouldn’t be there. I am not going to get into how they are trained." He flatly refused to discuss the issue of security clearances.
The strike and the FBI investigation drew unwanted attention to the island. Local residents in Connecticut and Long Island have long harbored suspicions about the nature of the research being done on "Mystery Island," as some call it. One local politician was quoted as saying, "I have gotten calls from constituents asking if it is safe. People worry about Plum Island under routine circumstances, so you can expect that they worry more when circumstances are as unusual as these."
Press requests to visit the island were denied by both the FBI and the USDA, but one union official claimed to have received a frantic call from one of the replacement workers. As he put it, "They were sleeping on cots, working 12- hour shifts and not being able to make calls off the island. He described their condition as being held captive." The chief operating officer of LB&B, Ed Brandon, scoffed at the report, saying that the worker in question had already left the island and that everything was under control and running smoothly.
As a result of the FBI investigation, one of the strikers, Mark J. DePonte, pleaded guilty to tampering with government property. Coincidentally, in October a 600-gallon container of liquid nitrogen somehow managed to tumble off the rear of one of the island’s ferries. Shortly thereafter, it was revealed that at least one of the replacement workers had an arrest record.
The Sunshine Project
http://www.sunshine-project.org
Biosafety Level 4 Planned
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts
NIH/USAMRIID, Ft. Detrick, Frederick, Maryland
Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia
Univ. of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston
Rocky Mountain Labs, Hamilton, Montana
(3)
Biosafety Level 3 Existing
Harvard Univ., Cambridge, Massachusetts
USDA Plum Island Center, New York
CALSPAN-UB, Buffalo, New York (AB)
PHRI, Newark, New Jersey
Armed Forces Inst. of Pathology, Washington, DC
Naval Medical Research Ctr., Bethesda, Maryland
US Army SBCCOM (2), Aberdeen, Maryland (AB)
Southern Research Inst., Frederick, Maryland
The Pentagon, Northern Virginia
George Mason University, Manassas, Virginia (AB)
US EPA, Cincinatti, Ohio
Battelle Memorial Inst., West Jefferson, Ohio
IITRI, Chicago, Illinois
Southern Reseach Inst., Birmingham, Alabama
Midwest Research Inst., Kansas City, Missouri (AB)
Centers for Disease Control, Ft. Collins, Colorado
Los Alamos National Lab, Los Alamos, New Mexico
ovelace Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico (AB)
US Army Dugway Proving Ground, Utah (AB)
University of Washington, Seattle
(AB) indicates aerobiology facility
[3]
Biosafety Level 3 Planned
UMD of New Jersey, Newark
University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
University of Alabama at Birmingham
University of Tennessee at Memphis
Tulane Primate Center, Covington, Louisiana
University of Missouri, Columbia
Argonne National Lab, Argonne, Illinois
Agricultural Biosecurity Ctr., Manhattan, Kansas
Centers for Disease Control, Ft. Collins, Colorado
Colorado State University, Fort Collins
Lawrence Livermore Lab, Livermore, California
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Mech on 04-28-2004] |
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Guest
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Thu Apr 29, 2004 6:59 am
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Check out Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone"
True story of a filovirus (Marburg strain) that broke out in the suburbs of Washington D.C. (in 1989) and the subsquent cleanup that followed. It was the first major biohazard operation on U.S. soil.
Very good detail on what the Level 4 Bio-containment scientists deal with. Long shifts ( one mistake and its all over). Filovirus's (including ebola) are almost 90% lethal ( although there have been survivors and some that have come in contact and not affected but those are a very,very small percentage.)
Scary, an outbreak of any virus whether level 3 or level 4 can happen at any time. All it takes is one careless mistake. These scientists work with these deadly viruses daily and could easily transmit it on the way home.
( A key point made in the book is that with all of our air, land, and sea traffic a virus originating out of africa or any place can travel the world in a day.)
Just some (scary) food for thought! |
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increase 1776
Joined: 07 Oct 2000
Posts: 3097
Location: Bizzaro World |
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Sat May 01, 2004 1:32 am
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Got enough labs? These people are real sick. |
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