Army Biolab’s Missing Vials May Never Be Found (Which, Oddly, Isn’t That Scary) | Danger Room | Wired.com
Army Biolab’s Missing Vials May Never Be Found (Which, Oddly, Isn’t That Scary)
# By Adam Rawnsley Email Author
# April 23, 2009
"Vials of a potentially harmful pathogen have gone missing at Fort Detrick, the Army’s main biodefense lab. But don’t freak out. The samples of
Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE) virus are relatively small. The Army has found “no evidence yet of criminal misconduct,” the Washington Post reports. And the virus usually causes only “a mild flulike illness” — although “brain inflammation and death” are possible, too. “It has potential for use as a biological weapon but is far less lethal than some other agents the lab works with.
That is to say, if someone were to get a quantity of VEE agent and some cooperative mosquitoes, it would lay up a number of people in the hospital, but the virus would not kill people as aerosolized anthrax would.
“We’ll probably never know exactly what happened,” one Army official tells the Post. “It could be the freezer malfunction. It could be they never existed.”"