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IP: Iraq bought lethal germs in U.S.
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2001 19:27:10 -0500
>From The Miami Herald, http://www.miami.com/herald/content/news/world/digdocs/084030.htm - Published Sunday, December 2, 2001 IRAQ BOUGHT LETHAL GERMS IN U.S. BY JUDITH MILLER, STEPHEN ENGELBERG AND WILLIAM BROAD During the Reagan years, the intelligence agencies began to collect new information about germ weapons and to issue reports on their spread to Third World countries. In June 1988, they said Iraq was well on its way to building ``a bacteriological arsenal'' under the cover of legitimate scientific research. The classified study was produced at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the headquarters for the U.S. germ research program, by the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center. The analysts said Baghdad's scientists had already produced weapons from Clostridium botulinum, which produces a deadly toxin 10,000 times more lethal than nerve gas. The report said Iraq was also trying to produce ``research and development'' quantities of weapons from anthrax and other deadly microbes. Details of the program were accompanied by a revelation that should have caught the eye of senior American officials. Iraqi scientists were buying their starter germs -- the foundation of any biological-weapons program -- from an American company. A scientific supply company then located in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, the American Type Culture Collection, housed the world's largest collection of germ strains, including particularly virulent variants of anthrax and botulinum discovered in the mid-1950s as part of the American germ-warfare program. The collection served as a global lending library for scientists beginning their own research in the field of microbiology and was considered an important tool in the fight to improve global health. Overseas customers were required to obtain a license from the Commerce Department to export the most virulent strains, but in 1988 this was largely a formality. Applications, from Iraq or anywhere else, were seldom denied. Two years earlier, in May 1986, the company had sold an assortment of germs to the University of Baghdad, including three different types of anthrax, five variants of botulinum, and three kinds of brucella, which causes an animal disease, brucellosis, that is incapacitating but rarely fatal. Further orders were planned.
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