GREED rather than jihad might have led to a potentially nasty virus being unleashed in the US. On Monday two former executives of Maine Biological Laboratories in Winslow, Maine, pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and mail fraud charges linked to smuggling a bird flu virus into the US. Other employees also face charges.
The company allegedly agreed to secretly produce a bird flu vaccine for a Saudi Arabian poultry producer that did not want to buy vaccine openly, as this would have revealed the presence of the disease and obliged it to destroy its flocks. The virus allegedly smuggled into the US in 1998 was not a 鈥渉ighly pathogenic鈥� strain and posed little threat to US flocks. But it was of a subtype that has twice jumped to humans, in Hong Kong in 1999 and 2003. The main worry is that the bird virus might recombine with a human virus in infected people, generating a deadly new strain to which no one is immune.
After the 2001 anthrax attacks, the US created tough laws for controlling disease agents, but these apply only to those that might be used as bioweapons. The bird flu virus is not considered weapons-related.
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