Fathers Canada

The outbreak started at the town's Rehoboth Christian School. Many students there belong to a religious denomination that doesn't endorse or objects to vaccinations. About 60 per cent of the elementary and high school pupils in the town have not been vaccinated. And about 340 students without protection have been excluded from the school until the outbreak is over. Martien Vanderspek, the school's principal, told CTV News people are prepared to accept the consequences of not getting vaccinated. Rubella is a highly contagious virus that can cause such symptoms as fever, headaches and joint pain in children. The disease can hit adults even harder, and poses the greatest health risk to pregnant women. Miscarriage is common, while the threat of congenital rubella syndrome hangs over women infected early in the fetus' development. Babies born with the condition can be deaf or blind, or suffer from cognitive disabilities or damaged hearts. "Whatever happens, they have a place in our community if it God's will a handicapped child is born, Vanderspek said. "I'm sure our community will do its best to make it feel at home and provide the best environment for it."  Also on Friday the local county's medical officer of health, Dr. Doug Sider, warned the number of infected could go up. "Yes, we expect to see further waves of infection," he told CTV's Kitchener, Ont., CKCO. Earlier in the day, Ontario's Health Minister George Smitherman spoke to Canada AM about the need for vaccination in the face of the outbreak. "It is my understanding that they take the view it is a matter of personal choice," Smitherman said. "It is a bit unfortunate. Something that's entirely preventable and otherwise could have been entirely eliminated from communities, isn't," he said, "because some people choose not to take advantage of vaccinations." Sider told CTV Newsnet his office is working hard to understand the belief systems that may have contributed to the outbreak. He said his office is "looking at any and all ways to dialogue with the community to try to get them to understand the extraordinary circumstance that we're in with the outbreak." He said getting vaccinated is likely the key. "If we can get vaccination levels up, it's probably the most durable way to bring the outbreak under control and prevent future outbreaks."  Sider also said he recognized "the need to be respectful of and sensitive to" issues of religious belief.

Countries like the United States and Canada cannot afford to focus only on protecting the health of their own citizens, given a flu pandemic's enormous potential to claim lives, drain the global economy and trigger panic and chaos around the globe, argued author Dr. Michael Osterholm, a leading infectious disease and bioterrorism expert.

"(Pandemic) influenza has the ability to literally bring this world to a screeching halt," Osterholm said Wednesday in an interview from Minneapolis, where he is director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

"Anyone who's handling this at just a country level is missing . . . the point that even if you can vaccinate your population, the collateral damage of a world in pandemic state will be so significant that they still will have tremendous, tremendous disruption and loss."

Influenza experts insist sporadic pandemics are biological certainties, triggered when a strain to which humans have no immunity arises from nature to sweep the globe.

Science currently has no way of predicting when a pandemic will occur or which strain will cause the next one. However, many flu experts fear the H5N1 strain rampaging through Asia may be poised to ignite the first pandemic of the 21st century.

Spurred by this fear, a number of developed countries have drafted pandemic response plans with provisions to make special vaccines and stockpile antiviral drugs that experts hope will reduce the number of fatalities in a pandemic.

But these measures are costly and out of the reach of most countries around the globe.

Canada's Health Minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, proposed an international meeting of about 15 leading developed and developing countries to address global pandemic preparedness needs when he met with U.S. Health Secretary Mike Leavitt in March. But those plans are currently on hold because of the Liberal government's precarious hold on power.

"These are all issues sort of up in the air as a result of the current environment in Ottawa," Dosanjh admitted Wednesday.

Osterholm's commentary, commissioned by the prestigious journal, calls for a massive, multinational initiative to modernize and vastly expand global flu vaccine production capacity, which currently can only produce about 330 million flu shots a year.

"This has to be a G-8 priority. And they have to do it for the rest of the world for their own security," he insisted.

"The kind of chaos and disorder that can occur with a disease that causes this kind of impact could easily be the tipping point for the instability of a number of governments around the world, particularly as their economies implode."

Osterholm suggested the initiative be modelled along the lines of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government's all-out drive to develop an atomic bomb during the Second World War.

The goal would be a vaccine that would protect against all influenza subtypes - eliminating the need to design a new vaccine annually - that can be grown in cell culture, he said.

The current process of growing virus in eggs is laborious and unpredictable and is dependent on vast supplies of hens' eggs. Experts believe a cell culture-based process would be faster and more reliable.

Dr. Bruce Gellin, who heads the U.S. pandemic preparedness efforts, called a universal flu vaccine the Holy Grail of the influenza world.

"I would put the quest for the common antigen influenza vaccine up there with HIV, TB and malaria (vaccines) as a global priority," Gellin, director of the U.S. National Vaccine Program Office, said from Washington.

The U.S. government, mindful that flu vaccine capacity within its borders runs to about 60 million doses a year, has issued numerous contracts in recent months aimed at seeding its domestic flu vaccine industry.

Among them is a $97 million contract to Sanofi Pasteur (formerly Aventis Pasteur) to develop, license and manufacture in the United States a flu vaccine produced in cell culture.

That type of government investment will significantly accelerate the industry's move towards cell culture production. It's a move experts believe is inevitable but which requires hefty investments the vaccine industry has been reluctant to shell out for a product with a low profit margin.

"There wasn't a good case for it," Gellin said flatly. "Essentially it's a new way to make a vaccine that is not the most lucrative thing they can work on."

But without a massive scale up elsewhere, the needs of countries which don't currently produce flu vaccine will still go unmet.

The head of the World Health Organization's influenza program liked Osterholm's idea, but said it would need to be studied to see if it was the most cost effective way to answer the need.

"I think it's a good idea and should work," Dr. Klaus Stohr said from Geneva.

"But one should not flatly jump on it without having calculated how much this approach would take away from other global killer diseases - like malaria, like AIDS, like tuberculosis."

Stohr noted there are other proposals on the table. One he has advanced would see countries that currently use flu vaccine donate five per cent of the annual cost of their programs into a global fund that would be used to finance research into a universal flu vaccine.

Over a period of 10 or 15 years, that kind of program could raise $1.5 billion in research funding, he suggested.

"It would be definitely worth trying it and it would be a lot of bang for the buck if it could be worked out," Stohr said.

Connaught laboratories is a major industrial developer and supplier of vaccine products for infectious disease and biotherapeutics. The company's 1700 employees include an active research and development group, an industrial scale-up group, and a large quality control group. As the premiere biotechnology company in Canada, with annual sales of 400 million dollars, the company has a unique resource base and highly qualified workforce. The company is now a member of the Pasteur-Merieux- Connaught organization. Connaught is willing to partner with EvNet in upgrading the skills of medical lab technologists through courseware mounted and run via First Class Client on LearnLink [Project 3(c) ]. The specific terms of this arrangement have yet to be worked out.

Project 3 (C): Evaluating Retraining Courses for Ontario Medical Lab Technologists. [Delsworth Harnish, McMaster] Post-diploma medical lab technologists in Ontario are facing unemployment due to the restructuring of Ontario hospitals. The Michener Institute of Applied Health Sciences approached over 160 biological/ biotechnology companies regarding their employment. They have indicated that their skills need upgrading, and Connaught Laboratories Ltd. has already expressed a willingness to participate in their continuing education, in cooperation with Michener, through courseware integrated with SoftArc's First Class Client software mounted on McMaster's LearnLink server. The objective of this project is to perform a formative evaluation of these educational upgrade programs for medical lab technologists.

Feds Tested AIDS Drugs on Foster Kids

Associated Press | May 5, 2005
By JOHN SOLOMON

WASHINGTON -- To gain access to hundreds of HIV-infected foster children, federally funded researchers promised in writing to provide an independent advocate to safeguard the kids' well-being as they tested potent AIDS drugs. But most of the time, that special protection never materialized, an Associated Press review has found.

The research funded by the National Institutes of Health spanned the country. It was most widespread in the 1990s as foster care agencies sought treatments for their HIV-infected children that weren't yet available in the marketplace.

RELATED:

AIDS Study Review Boards Lacked Focus

Were HIV Positive Foster Kids Used As Guinea Pigs?

Guinea Pig Kids: How New York City is Using Children to Test Experimental AIDS Drugs

Young Children and Babies Used as Lab Rats in Drug Trials

The practice ensured that foster children -- mostly poor or minority -- received care from world-class researchers at government expense, slowing their rate of death and extending their lives. But it also exposed a vulnerable population to the risks of medical research and drugs that were known to have serious side effects in adults and for which the safety for children was unknown.

The research was conducted in at least seven states -- Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas -- and involved more than four dozen different studies. The foster children ranged from infants to late teens, according to interviews and government records.

Several studies that enlisted foster children reported that patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells, and one reported a "disturbing" higher death rate among children who took higher doses of a drug, records show.

The government provided special protections for child wards in 1983. They required researchers and their oversight boards to appoint independent advocates for any foster child enrolled in a narrow class of studies that involved greater than minimal risk and lacked the promise of direct benefit.

Some foster agencies, including those in Illinois and New York, required researchers to sign a document agreeing to provide the protection regardless of risks and benefits.

However, researchers and foster agencies told AP that foster children in AIDS drug trials often weren't given such advocates even though research institutions many times promised in writing to do so.

Illinois officials believe none of their nearly 200 foster children in AIDS studies got independent monitors. New York City could find records showing 142 -- less than a third -- of the 465 foster children in AIDS drug trials got such monitors even though city policy required them. The city has asked an outside firm to investigate.

Likewise, research facilities including Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said they concluded they didn't provide advocates for foster kids.

Some foster children died during studies, but state or city agencies said they could find no records that any deaths were directly caused by experimental treatments.

Researchers typically secured permission to enroll foster children through city or state agencies. And they frequently exempted themselves from appointing advocates by concluding the research carried minimal risk and the child would benefit directly because the drugs already had been tried in adults.

"Our position is that advocates weren't needed," said Marilyn Castaldi, spokeswoman for Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.

If they decline to appoint advocates under the federal law, researchers and their oversight boards must conclude that the experimental treatment affords the same or better risk-benefit possibilities than alternate treatments already in the marketplace. They also must abide by any additional protections required by state and local authorities.

Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said advocates should have been appointed for all foster children because researchers felt the pressure of a medical crisis and knew there was great uncertainty as to how children would react to AIDS medications that were often toxic for adults.

"It is exactly that set of circumstances that made it absolutely mandatory to get those kids those advocates," Caplan said. "It is inexcusable that they wouldn't have an advocate for each one of those children.

"When you have the most vulnerable subjects imaginable -- kids without parents -- you really do have to come in with someone independent, who doesn't have a dog in this fight," he said.

Those who made the decisions say the research gave foster kids access to drugs they otherwise couldn't get. And they say they protected the children's interest by carefully explaining risks and benefits to state guardians, foster parents and the children themselves.

"I understand the ethical dilemma surrounding the introduction of foster children into trials," said Dr. Mark Kline, a pediatric AIDS expert at Baylor College of Medicine. He enrolled some Texas foster kids in his studies, and doesn't recall appointing advocates for them.

"To say as a group that foster children should be excluded from clinical trials would have meant excluding these children from the best available therapies at the time," he said. "From an ethical perspective, I never thought that was a stand I could take."

Illinois officials directly credit the decision to enroll HIV-positive foster kids with bringing about a decline in deaths -- from 40 between 1989 and 1995 to only 19 since.

Some states declined to participate in medical experiments. Tennessee said its foster care rules generally prohibit enlisting children in such trials. California requires a judge's order. And Wisconsin "has absolutely never allowed, nor would we even consider, any clinical experiments with the children in our foster care system," spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said.

Officials estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent of the 13,878 children enrolled in pediatric AIDS studies funded by NIH since the late 1980s were in foster care. More than two dozen Illinois foster children remain in studies today.

NIH, the government health research agency that funded the studies, did not track researchers to determine whether they appointed advocates. Instead, the decision was left to medical review boards made up of volunteers at each study site.

A recent Institute of Medicine study concluded those Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were often overwhelmed, dominated by scientists and not focused enough on patient protections.

The U.S. Office for Human Research Protections, created to protect research participants after the notorious Tuskegee syphilis studies on black men in the 1930s, is investigating the use of foster children in AIDS research. The office declined to discuss the probe.

AP's review found that if children were old enough -- usually between 5 and 10 -- they also were educated about the risks and asked to consent. Sometimes, foster parents or biological parents were consulted; other times not.

Research and foster agencies declined to make foster parents or children in the drug trials available for interviews, or to provide information about individual drug dosages, side effects or deaths, citing medical privacy laws.

Other families who participated in the same drug trials told AP their children mostly benefited but parents needed to carefully monitor potential side effects. Foster children, they said, need the added protection of an independent advocate.

"If they did not fulfill that requirement, how can you be sure the community participant really got the benefit and the informed consent that is needed," said Michelle Lopez, a New Jersey woman whose daughter has participated in drug trials.

"I was very concerned about that because the argument we are getting is the kids are getting better and we are enhancing their lives, but none of these drugs save these kids lives," she said.

Many studies that enlisted foster children involved early Phase I and Phase II research -- the riskiest -- to determine side effects and safe dosages so children could begin taking adult "cocktails," the powerful drug combinations that suppress AIDS but can cause bad reactions like rashes and organ damage.

Some of those drugs were approved ultimately for children, such as stavudine and zidovudine. Other medicines were not.

Illinois officials confirmed two or three foster children were approved to participate in a mid-1990s study of dapsone. Researchers hoped the drug would prevent a pneumonia that afflicts AIDS patients.

Researchers reported some children had to be taken off the drug because of "serious toxicity," others developed rashes, and the rates of death and blood toxicity were significantly higher in children who took the medicine daily, rather than weekly.

At least 10 children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning, and researchers said they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. They said the deaths didn't appear to be "directly attributable" to dapsone but nonetheless were "disturbing."

"An unexpected finding in our study was that overall mortality while receiving the study drug was significantly higher in the daily dapsone group. This finding remains unexplained," the researchers concluded.

Another study involving foster children in the 1990s treated children with different combinations of adult antiretroviral drugs. Among 52 children, there were 26 moderate to severe reactions -- nearly all in infants. The side effects included rash, fever and a major drop in infection-fighting white blood cells.

New York City officials defend the decision to enlist foster children en masse, saying there was a crisis in the early 1990s and research provided the best treatment possibilities. Nonetheless, they are changing their policy so they no longer give blanket permission to enroll children in preapproved studies.

"We learned some things from our experience," said Elizabeth Roberts, assistant commissioner for child and family health at the Administration for Children's Services. "It is a more individualized review we will be conducting."

AIDS Study Review Boards Lacked Focus

ASSOCIATED PRESS | May 6, 2005
By JOHN SOLOMON

WASHINGTON (AP) - The job of appointing protective advocates for foster children in AIDS drug trials has been left up to local review boards at each study site. A recent review said those boards were overworked, were inappropriately dominated by scientists and lacked focus on patient safety.

The Institute of Medicine, the nation's most authoritative voice on medical research ethics, urged the government to make sweeping changes to the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to refocus them on patient safety.

"As modern IRBs have tended to become larger and to reflect a broader range of scientific expertise, some IRB deliberations have tended to be dominated by the scientific perspective, increasing the potential to marginalize the perspectives of nonscientist members and those who focus on ethics-based concerns," IOM reported in October 2002.

Most of the AIDS drug trials that enrolled foster children were conducted in the 1990s. The review boards often exempted the researchers from a federal regulation requiring appointment of independent advocates to protect the rights of children who might move from home to home during a study.

The IOM said one of the biggest problems for review boards was that they began taking on many other issues without adequate resources, reducing their focus on protecting patients.

"IRBs, which are intended to focus on the ethical review and oversight of proposals, find it exceedingly difficult to both manage the increasing volume of protocol actions and ensure the safety of research volunteers, particularly when these boards are often under-resourced," the report said.

The panel recommended renaming IRBs as ethics review boards and narrowing their focus to protecting human participants, shedding other jobs such as keeping an eye on researchers for potential conflicts of interest.

Government Researchers Tested AIDS Drugs on Foster Kids Government-funded researchers tested AIDS drugs on hundreds of foster children over the past two decades, often without providing them a basic protection afforded in federal law and required by some states, an Associated Press review has found.

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Here's Who We're Fighting -- People Like Peter Singer, Princeton "Bioethicist," and His Government Buddies Who Invited Him to Speak at the NH Governor's Commission on Disability, Where He Made the Disgusting Comments: "'I do think that it is sometimes appropriate to kill a human infant,'' he said, adding that he does not believe a newborn has a right to life until it reaches some minimum level of consciousness.

Virus death toll rising in Angola LUANDA, Angola (AP) - The rare Marburg virus has killed 280 people in Angola over the past six months, at a fatality rate of 89 per cent, authorities said. Full Story

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West Nile testing begins  Health officials in British Columbia begin testing mosquitoes Sunday for the West Nile virus.

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Worldwide cancer rates 'double'

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Joe Gandelman | April 27 2005

A potentially big scandal is unfolding in New York City that — if proven true — has serious implications on two fronts.

The two-pronged allegations entail powder-keg charges that the city tested AIDS drugs on foster children and that if a foster parent objected the children were then placed elsewhere.

The New York papers have started breaking this story and if it isn't proven incorrect it could prove to be quite explosive. First, some tidbits from The New York Times:

The city's Administration for Children's Services has hired an outside research firm to investigate allegations that the city inappropriately put foster children into medical trials for AIDS drugs in the 1980's and 1990's and that foster parents who objected to the trials lost custody of the children.

The agency also said it would form a panel of national health care experts to review the findings of the investigation, to be conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based nonprofit research group. The agency's commissioner, John B. Mattingly, said he thought that children's services had acted appropriately but that he has asked for the outside investigation to allay concerns raised by some reporters and by a minority advocacy group. Most of the children in the trials were African-American or Hispanic.

"We are taking this step because, while we believe that the policies in place at the time reflected good practice, we acknowledge the need for transparency in all of our dealings with the public," Mr. Mattingly said. "For us to be effective in our mission to protect New York City's children, we must have a sense of mutual trust with those families we seek to serve."

Accusations that the city had allowed babies in foster care who were not perilously ill to be used in medical testing of AIDS drugs were first reported in The New York Post in 2004.

At the time, officials from the agency and from the hospitals where the trials had taken place said they had been legitimately conducted on only foster children dying of AIDS who had no other medical options at the time.

The Times' story gives Mattingly's explanations that nothing untoward happened. Some facts he offers:

The review by the agency staff, he said, determined that about 465 children had taken part in the trials between 1988 and 2001, with most participating before current treatments for AIDS became commonly available. He said that according to the records only two children were removed from foster parents who refused to undergo the trials and that both of those children had serious medical conditions that required treatment.

But Vera Hassner Sharav, the president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection says the agency can't be trusted to in effect investigate itself:

She said that documents filed with the federal government showed that many of the foster children were only presumed to have AIDS. "It's a hell of a thing to give a child toxic drugs when they are only presumed to have AIDS," Ms. Sharav said.

And it doesn't end there.

News-Medical.Net focuses on the outrage and includes these questions raised by New York State Assemblyman Keith Wright:

--Who made the decision to administer the drugs?
--How old were the children, and where were they from?
--Given that this program began in an era when people had yet to fully comprehend the how and why people contracted HIV, were the children made aware of what medications they were taking, and for what they were taking them?
---Given that medical science was not nearly advanced at the time this program began, was sound medical science utilized in administration of these drugs?
--Were the foster or birth parents made aware, and was permission given?

Meanwhile, the AP has lots of info on the controversy and offers this on what comes next:

The review also will examine whether the children fit the medical criteria to be included in the tests and if the enrollments were appropriate given the medical knowledge of the time, according to the ACS.

Mattingly said he did not believe that any children had died from their participation in the research.

He said investigators will try to find as many of the participating children as possible to assess their current medical condition, and the agency will also be reviewing records to see if there were more children who participated.

If you ponder this case, you can see that the key questions (as from the ones Wright raised) are these:

If this indeed happened, what kinds of drugs were tested?

Who ordered them to be tested?

Who specifically got the drugs?

What, if anything, resulted from the drugs? Did the drugs help or hurt these children? If so, specifically, in what ways?

What are the specifics — even if it only occured with one case — regarding any foster parents whose kids were removed because they would not agree to it? What do these foster parents (if they are still around) have to say under oath to investigators? Every effort should be made to locate them.

On a case like this there seem to be several possible outcomes.

It could turn out that this is a case of a group and some elected officials making allegations that prove to be overblown. Credibility is like oil in a well. Once removed, you can't put more back in.

Or it could turn out that for some 20 years foster kids were used as human guinea pigs and pulled out of homes where their foster parents wouldn't agree. The argument will then be made that the intentions weren't bad and that if the drugs succeeded millions of lives could be saved. But if the allegations are proven true then those arguments, we are sure, will tested extensively by some lawyers who could become quite rich.

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NIH Scientists Fight To Retain Ties To Big Pharma Scientists at the National Institutes of Health who are fighting new rules that would end their financial ties to the drug industry have hired, at a favorable rate, a law and lobbying firm that also represents the companies.

Deadly '57 flu accidentally sent to Canadian labs
MONTREAL - Samples of an Asian flu virus that is suspected of killing one million people worldwide in 1957 has wound up by accident in 20 labs across Canada, as well as in thousands of others in the United States and around the world.

Labs destroying pandemic flu strain LONDON (AP) - Thousands of scientists were scrambling Tuesday at the urging of global health authorities to destroy vials of a pandemic flu strain sent to labs in 18 countries as part of routine testing. Full Story 

LONDON (AP) - Thousands of scientists were scrambling Tuesday at the urging of global health authorities to destroy vials of a pandemic flu strain sent to labs in 18 countries as part of routine testing. The rush, urged by the World Health Organization, was sparked by a slim, but real, risk that the samples could spark a global flu epidemic. "The risk is relatively low that a lab worker will get sick, but a large number of labs got it and if someone does get infected, the risk of severe illness is high and this virus has shown to be fully transmissible," WHO's influenza chief, Dr. Klaus Stohr, told The Associated Press.

Vials Of Deadly Flu Virus Still Missing

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Scientists Scramble to Destroy Flu Strain

Vancouver lab mishap alerted world to flu pandemic risk
Potentially deadly strain shipped to 4,000 labs in 18 countries

http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=77f9ea35-bec7-448d-b99f-9660ce3522e1
Pamela Fayerman
Vancouver Sun

April 14, 2005

A chain of events that began in a microbiology laboratory in a Vancouver hospital may have helped avert a global pandemic when it was discovered last month that a potentially deadly flu strain had been shipped to 4,000 labs worldwide. The alert has led to laboratories around the world rapidly destroying stocks of deadly H2N2 flu strain, which killed four million people during a flu pandemic in 1957. But the problem only came to light when the Vancouver laboratory, which has not been identified, sent a patient specimen to the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

The Winnipeg lab did extensive tests and relayed the results to the Vancouver facility, which alerted health authorities in this country and in the U.S. that a deadly strain had been accidentally shipped to about 4,000 laboratories in 18 countries for practise-only purposes. Ironically, however, it was a mistake made in the Vancouver lab that eventually led to the discovery. Dr. Perry Kendall, B.C.'s top public health official, said the chain of events originated in March when the Vancouver hospital sent a sample from a female patient to the national lab for further testing to determine what subtype of influenza A she had. It turned out the sample had been cross-contaminated with H2N2. The sample took three weeks to culture and subtype; results finally came back on the Easter weekend. Thousands of other labs around the world were also unwittingly in possession of the H2N2 virus because none had bothered to do the kind of detailed sub-typing that was done in this case. Kendall said the sample was sent for further testing to Winnipeg because "influenza didn't fit with the patient's clinical symptoms. 

"There was no history of her getting anything that looked like influenza." He said when the national lab revealed the results "we were really concerned that we had discovered a new strain of influenza in our population, but then we realized this patient had not traveled, had no contacts with any potential sources of H2N2. "So upon further discussion, we decided that her sample was probably contaminated. Then the detective work figured out that on the same day that her specimen had been prepared for shipping to the lab in Winnipeg, the lab had also been conducting proficiency testing," said Kendall, referring to the tests lab workers conduct to know how to identify and characterize viral strains. Kendall said the lab is conducting a review to find out precisely how the cross-contamination occurred. "It's a problem the lab is addressing. It's always a problem which laboratories can have, because it takes just minute traces for this to happen. "In a perfect world, cross-contamination would not occur and it is indeed very rare," Dr. Danuta Skowronski, physician-epidemiologist at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, added. "But obviously, humans are fallible. Those who work in laboratories are taught to assume that every agent is potentially infectious, whether they know what it is or not," she said.

Kendall said he was refusing to disclose the identity of the hospital lab "because there is nothing to be gained, from a public health [point of view by disclosing it." Skowronski said health officials act on a "need to know basis and if there is no threat to public health, there is no need to disclose" the hospital identity.

B.C. public health officials said Wednesday it is not believed any laboratory workers or other citizens in the province -- or indeed anywhere in the world -- have contracted the H2N2 influenza strain, which was contained in vials shipped to labs from the United States. The vials containing live virus were produced by a Cincinnati-based test-kit maker and shipped by the College of American Pathologists in February so that lab workers could gain proficiency at typing viral strains for accreditation purposes. The H2N2 strain hasn't circulated in the world since 1968, so anyone born after that time would have no immunity to it, raising the spectre that if people suddenly did become exposed to it, a pandemic could result. H2N2 is considered one of five candidates for an influenza pandemic. Dr. Perry Kendall, B.C.'s top public health official, said when the vials were shipped, they were improperly labelled as A/Shanghai, related to the influenza strain that has been circulating in North America this past winter. Kendall said it was "neither sensible nor wise" to send the H2N2 subtype and it was also "unacceptable to mislabel the vials." The U.S. government is investigating. The WHO has alerted labs which received the virus to destroy it. © The Vancouver Sun 2005

Vials Of Deadly Flu Virus Still Missing
April 16, 2005
http://www.healthtalk.ca/flu_virus_041605_90023.php
Two vials of a killer influenza virus shipped as testing kits to several countries around the world to help laboratories conduct proficiency testing in virus detection remain unaccounted for, according to Klaus Stohr, influenza chief for the World Health Organization. The UN agency said shipments of the vials of H2N2 virus sent to laboratories in Lebanon and Mexico, never reached their destinations and are still missing.

The agency said about two-thirds of 3,700 laboratories around the world that received samples of a killer flu virus have destroyed them as instructed. The H2N2 virus strain of the Asian flu killed between 1 million and 4 million people around the world in 1957. The virus was distributed to labs worldwide by the US College of American Pathologists (CAP), as part of routine testing to determine the ability of labs to identify virus strains. Most people born after 1968 have no immunity to the 1957 H2N2 virus.

WINNIPEG - The World Health Organization (WHO) is worried because Canada's leading lab found positive results in SARS tests that other labs can't reproduce. Health Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg tested samples from residents of a Surrey, B.C. nursing home in August and found the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus in 10 of them. Full Story

Other information on other virus http://www.canoe.ca/Health0108/24_westnile2-sun.html

Courting Armageddon: How the Bush administration's biological weapons buildup affects you

By Heather Wokusch
Online Journal Guest Writer

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April 15, 2005—News that a U.S. company recently sent vials of a 1957 pandemic flu strain to laboratories across the world by accident is only the latest outrage from the billion-dollar boondoggle called the federal biological weapons program.

As you might recall, the Bush administration started its "biodefense" spending spree following the September 2001 deadly anthrax attacks, and one of its first projects was to genetically engineer a super-resistant, even more deadly version of the anthrax virus.

Our leaders are nuts.

Unfortunately, Project Jefferson has good company. A US Army scientist in Maryland is currently trying to bring back elements of the 1918 Spanish flu, a virus which killed 40 million people. And a virologist in St. Louis has been working on a more lethal form of mousepox (related to smallpox)—just to try stopping the virus once it's been created. Full Story

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Vietnam finds HIV carrier infected with bird flu A 21-year-old woman has been infected by both the deadly HIV/AIDS virus and bird flu, the first such case in Vietnam, health officials said Thursday.

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Listen to Alex Jones Interviews Dr. Robert Gould

Alex interviews Dr. Robert Gould, President of the San Francisco Bay Area Physicians for Social Responsibility on the development of biological weapons.

Problems listening to the audio? Play the audio directly in Real Player or download the video using the following link -
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/061104gould.mp3

US Military Operating a Secret Chemical Weapons Program
Sunshine Project provides evidence for US violation of international law

Sunshine Project.org

The Sunshine Project today accuses the US military of conducting a chemical weapons research and development program in violation of international arms control law. The charges follow an 18 month investigation of the Department of Defense's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD). The investigation made extensive use of the US Freedom of Information Act to obtain Pentagon records that form the primary basis of the allegations. An array of documents, many of which have been posted on the Sunshine Project website, demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that JNLWD is operating an illegal and classified chemical weapons program.

Specifically, the Sunshine Project accuses the JNLWD of:

1. Conducting a research and development program on toxic chemical agents for use as weapons, including anesthetics and psychoactive substances, in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention;

2. Developing long-range military delivery devices for these chemicals, including an 81mm chemical mortar round, that violate the Chemical Weapons Convention.

3. Pursuing a chemical weapons program while fully cognizant that it violates the Chemical Weapons Convention and US Department of Defense regulations;

4. Attempting to cover up the illicit program by classifying as secret even its own legal interpretations of the Chemical Weapons Convention and attempting to block access to documents requested under US information freedom law.

These charges are detailed in the attached Annex to this news release, in the accompanying map and fact sheet, and the Sunshine Project's JNLWD documents web page, which has full text of more than two dozen documents. Specific citations are in footnotes below.

The Weapons: JNLWD's secret program is not focusing on highly lethal agents such as VX or sarin. Rather, the emphasis is on "non-lethal" chemical weapons that incapacitate. JNLWD's science advisors define "non-lethal" as resulting in death or permanent injury in 1 in 100 victims.(1) JNLWD's Research Director told a US military magazine "We need something besides tear gas, like calmatives, anesthetic agents, that would put people to sleep or in a good mood." (2) These weapons are intended for use against "potentially hostile civilians", in anti-terrorism operations, counterinsurgency, and other military operations.

The major focus of JNLWD's operation is on the use of drugs as weapons, particularly so-called "calmatives", a military term for mind-altering or sleep inducing chemical weapons. Other agents mentioned as militarily useful in the documents are convulsants, which are dangerous cramp-inducing drugs, and pharmaceuticals that failed development trials due to harmful side-effects. (3) This interest in so-called "calmatives" has been discussed in previous Project publications. (4)

New documents prove the existence of an advanced development program for long range delivery devices for the chemicals, in particular a "non-lethal" 81mm mortar round with a range of 2.5 kilometers and which is designed to work in standard issue US military weapons (the M252 mortar) (5). Photos of testing of this round and a gas generating payload canister are posted on the Sunshine Project's website. (6) JNLWD has recently asked the company building the gas canister, General Dynamics, to develop methodologies to characterize the aerosols it generates, and to calculate the ground area coverage of gas clouds created by an airburst at different altitudes. (7) A chemical mortar round with a 2.5 kilometer range has solely military applications, and cannot possibly be justified for a US military domestic riot control purpose.

The Solutions:

1) UN Inspectors into the US: The Sunshine Project, while urging the United States to immediately halt this chemical weapons program, also announces its intention to take its allegations and evidence to the 7th Session of the Conference of the States Parties of the Chemical Weapons Convention, scheduled to start in The Hague on October 7th. There, the Sunshine Project will present its case to governments and request tthe Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons send a UN weapons inspection team to the US to investigate.

2) US Oversight: The Sunshine Project calls upon the US Congress to investigate JNLWD's arms control violations, to conduct public hearings, to hold JNLWD and its superiors responsible for their actions, to freeze all JNLWD funding, and to immediately declassify all JNLWD documents.

Says Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project US, "We can present hard evidence for an illicit and shameful chemical weapons program in the US. If the US invades Iraq and uses these weapons, we may witness the depravity of the US waging chemical warfare against Iraq to prevent it from developing chemical weapons."

Jan van Aken, Director of the Sunshine Project in Germany says "The US administration 'names names' of alleged violators at arms control meetings. We have written documentation that the British government told JNLWD that its program violates the CWC in private talks. (8) However, Europe must publicly denounce American chemical weapons violations in The Hague. Those who remain silent will bear part of the guilt."

Escalation danger: JNLWD's chemical weapons program not only violates international law, it presents an escalation threat. Any use of chemical weapons in a military situation - even if the agents are purported to be "non-lethal" - carries the inherent danger of escalation into an all out chemical war and heightened violence. If attacked with a chemical of unknown nature with a fast incapacitating effect, victims may assume that lethal chemicals have been used, leading to heightened violence or even retaliation in kind. This rapid escalation danger is one of the key reasons why the Chemical Weapons Convention prohibits the use of even tear gas or pepper spray as a method of warfare.

The Road to a Chemical Arms Race: In addition, JNLWD's program might easily be used to disguise lethal chemical weapons development. Deadly chemicals are the former specialty of JNLWD's partner in the program, the US Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground. Long range delivery devices may easily be converted to use biological agents or other chemicals, including lethal nerve gas. Design and development of new delivery devices, production facilities or delivery experiments - all key parts of a lethal chemical weapons program - might easily be performed by the US or other countries if the buzz-word "non-lethal" is used as a cover. If non-lethal chemical warfare programs are not banned, the basic principles of the CWC could fall apart, resulting in new full blown chemical arms race even before Cold War stocks are destroyed.