'High Risk of Biological Hazard' In Sudan After Fighters Seize Biolab, WHO Says (vice.com) 50
The World Health Organization (WHO) said there's a "high risk of biological hazard" in Khartoum, the capitol of Sudan, after a biolab containing deadly pathogens was seized by fighters. From a report: There's a war in Sudan right now as two rival generals struggle for power. After a week of fighting, one of the factions has seized the National Public Health Laboratory which contains samples of measles, cholera, polio, and other diseases. Now, lab workers are unable to return to the facility and secure the hazardous materials. "This is the main concern: no accessibility to the lab technicians to go to the lab and safely contain the biological material and substances available," Nima Saeed Abid, the WHO's representative in Sudan, told reporters on Tuesday.
According to the lab's website, it contains "reference laboratories related to the control of some diseases such as polio, measles, tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS." The lab is engaged in various aspects of studying and controlling diseases, including identifying pathogens, testing for them, and sending samples to international labs. The work is aimed at preventing and identifying possible epidemics, and the lab works with the WHO. The fighting in Sudan has already killed 459 people and injured 4,072, and the release of a deadly pathogen would lead to more suffering. The fighting is between generals Abdel Fattah Burhan and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. Burhan is the head of the country's military and Dagalo is the leader of a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces. The RSF got its start as a Janjaweed militia, an Arab fighting group that operated in Darfur.
According to the lab's website, it contains "reference laboratories related to the control of some diseases such as polio, measles, tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS." The lab is engaged in various aspects of studying and controlling diseases, including identifying pathogens, testing for them, and sending samples to international labs. The work is aimed at preventing and identifying possible epidemics, and the lab works with the WHO. The fighting in Sudan has already killed 459 people and injured 4,072, and the release of a deadly pathogen would lead to more suffering. The fighting is between generals Abdel Fattah Burhan and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. Burhan is the head of the country's military and Dagalo is the leader of a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces. The RSF got its start as a Janjaweed militia, an Arab fighting group that operated in Darfur.
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Yea my question was 'why are we allowing Sudan to have a biolab' followed up with 'why don't we regularly bomb Sudan', but please carry on
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a public health lab [Re:Why?] (Score:2)
"It's a regular health lab, not a high containment facility.... The agents which are in the lab are all diseases which are endemic in the region anyway, so they wouldn't really be classified as high risk"
sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
See also https://thebulletin.org/2023/0... [thebulletin.org]
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/25... [cnn.com]
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Why do we get to say whether or not sudan gets a biolab? This isn't a weapons research plant, they get sick people in Sudan too, you know? Go home. You're drunk.
As long as you don't mind unstable countries having easy disease spreading activities when they have their annual uprisings. It's a great thing then.
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So these countries should learn to stand on their own two feet, provided they don't indulge in a list of activities that their betters indicate. Got it.
The Sudan is not a cradle of stability. Let's look at modern history. Might as well use January 1, 1956, Sudan independence from Britain and Egypt as a baseline. After some years of Democratic rule, in 1969, Colonel Col. Gaafar Nimeiry led a coup, installed himself as president, outlawed political parties and dissolved the Sudanese Parliament.
In 1972, there was a Marxist coup that was successful. Then Anit-Marxist forces had yet another, and re-installed Nimery.
Then in 1972, the ongoing civil war that had
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
These labs exist in these places because these places have a history of diseases originating there.
I haven't seen The Walking Dead so I couldn't comment on how a fictional lab-destruction was performed, but my guess is that 1) these labs normally enjoy a certain amount of autonomy more akin to a diplomatic mission where they're usually above the fray, and 2) the difficulty in setting up some kind of destruction system and maintaining it to function operationally is pretty high. For the latter, just thinking about the sorts of decontamination that has been discussed when BL3 or BL4 labs are retired is pretty high, it's not easy to make-safe one of these facilities without a whole lot of manual effort.
As for the first point, normally diplomatic missions such as embassies and consulates enjoy a certain amount of protection, even during things like wars. Normally the victor in a war wants to be able to retain good relations with foreign countries and will generally avoid attacking those missions in order to not worsen relations. This scientific mission in Khartoum is experiencing the same sorts of dangers that the embassies are seeing though, dangers not normally seen. It isn't that this scenario is without precedent, but it's uncommon and the costs to attempt to build/structure to prevent it may just not be worthwhile. After all, there's only so much one can do to protect a fixed installation no matter the budget.
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So you don't think it's a good idea to have labs that can work on the specific disease variants discovered locally?
I mean, I know there's cholera, polio, and tuberculosis outbreaks in Wisconsin all the time, so clearly that's where we should be studying the variants during outbreaks and while they are mutating into different strains, right?
Re: Why? (Score:2)
They shouldn't have samples of diseases that aren't in Sudan locally. Any more than they should have weapons grade fissionables.
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If you had symptoms of measles, you'd got to the hospital, their lab would test for measles, and if you had it they'd report that case to the CDC. In a country like Sudan you probably don't have a local hospital, and its capabilities may be limited, which means the country is going to rely on centralized resources like the public health lab for testing and surveillance.
This lab isn't handling stuff like weaponized anthrax; it's the stuff that your local hospital lab handles, but on a much huger scale becau
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Yeah, what a stupid idea to study diseases in Africa.
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Yeah, what a stupid idea to study diseases in Africa.
Other questions aside, you seem to be implying that the whole of Africa is like Sudan. No. Africa is huge and diverse. Sudan is a shithole. South Sudan and Somalia are worse. But most of Africa is a lot better, and many countries are very nice to visit.
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I'm not implying any such thing. I've been to lots of nice places in Africa, and Sudan is far from the worst place on the planet.
In case it wasn't clear, "Yeah, what a stupid idea to study diseases in Africa" was sarcasm.
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Because shithole countries at risk of war have other criteria which makes them ideal candidates for things like biohazard research labs....
Cheap labor costs
Little/no resistance from the locals about having a dangerous lab on their doorstep
Little/no regulations which would make this kind of research difficult or expensive
Creating a biological weapon is hard (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't worry too much about it. Creating and releasing a biological weapon is actually really hard science. Any specimens that the lab may have been holding for whatever reason is probably already dead. To have preserved it and then weaponize it and release it would not only be really stupid, but would also be significantly out of technical capability of 99.999999% of people on earth.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I get that there is decent evidence against Ivans, yet it seems bizarre that he chose to do it.
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I would be pretty sure it would never happen (for a variety of reasons), except for the anthrax attack right after 9/11.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I get that there is decent evidence against Ivans, yet it seems bizarre that he chose to do it.
Then why does the WHO even care? Not a problem at all, nothing to see here, folks
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I was going to say "smallpox blankets", but it turns out it was unlikely to have worked [history.com], and is apparently not well documented except for the one case in that article.
OTOH, if you consider the accidental release of invasive species and their costs: dutch elm disease, quagga muscles, jumping carp, and of course smallpox by personal contact; it's actually hard *not* to create biological weapons at times.
Re:Creating a biological weapon is hard (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think anyone believes this lab is creating biological weapons. It's just that most people's only information on this stuff comes from Hollywood thrillers, so to many of us bioweapons are the *familiar* threat. It's kind of like quicksand; based on your movie experience, quicksand is something you really need to be worried about.
I think the actual threat here may be potentially infected laboratory animals. Your local hospital routlinely handles samples infected with pathogens that require level three containment, but the *things they're doing with them* only require level 2 containment. So it's perfectly fine to run standard lab tests on suspected SARS-COV-2 samples or West Nile in a commonplace BSL-2 facility. But anythign that involves *multiplying* the virus kicks up the danger level and the required precautions.
One of the thing a lab like this might do that would kick up the danger level is to work with infected animals. They may need to do this to determine whether common livestock or wildlife represent a potential reservoir for the pathogen. Since these would be suspected zoonotic pathogens, those animals would be extremely dangerous.
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while it is hard to weaponize in the modern weapon sense, it is really for people to get infected of say polio and then start traveling and spreading it naturally, you know, sort of like covid 19 except worse...
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I don't think anyone believes this lab is creating biological weapons.
At least, until it was seized by the revolutionaries.
More seriously, it sounds like the biggest threat is probably that the fighters who seized it get themselves sick and many of the people in their immediate vicinity, with stuff that in the first world there are already vaccines against or are at least treatable.
WHO says? (Score:2)
Well, what are you askin' me for?
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Well, what are you askin' me for?
Two fiddy!
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Right, mutant nuclear superpowered pathogens just what we need.
Re: purge it with holy fire (Score:1)
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I think you don't understand either microbes or nuclear weapons. Most of the heat from a nuclear blast doesn't penetrate very far. Wooden building survived in Nagasaki without catching fire, and a tactical nuke is a lot less powerful. And in a lab most of the microbes will be stored in "safe containers". A nuke would be much more likely to break them open than to kill all the contents.
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I think you don't understand either microbes or nuclear weapons. Most of the heat from a nuclear blast doesn't penetrate very far. Wooden building survived in Nagasaki without catching fire
Nothing within a mile "survived".
and a tactical nuke is a lot less powerful
What matters is the direct strike not the yield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And in a lab most of the microbes will be stored in "safe containers". A nuke would be much more likely to break them open than to kill all the contents.
Unlike in the movies if you nuke the bastards the target does not remain.
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I'd really like to know the basis for the claim that "nothing within a mile survived". If you claimed no human on the surface within a mile survived, I'd believe you without asking for references, but what you're claiming is a lot more extreme. I seem to remember that there was a school on the far side of a hill that the students in survived. OTOH, it might not have been within a mile. But what I'm really doubting is that all the earthworms at ground zero were killed. (Say within 1000 feet of ground ze
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I'd really like to know the basis for the claim that "nothing within a mile survived". If you claimed no human on the surface within a mile survived, I'd believe you without asking for references, but what you're claiming is a lot more extreme. I seem to remember that there was a school on the far side of a hill that the students in survived.
The context of my remarks is blowing up a building by striking it with a tactical nuclear weapon. Blast obstructed by terrain scenario does not seem like it would be applicable in this situation.
But what I'm really doubting is that all the earthworms at ground zero were killed. (Say within 1000 feet of ground zero.)
Lab is likely to be a small fraction of this size I would say a few hundred feet across rather than 2000 feet across. Ideally every doubling of distance results in a 4x reduction of blast energy so being off by an order of magnitude is a BFD.
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Lab may also have interior cement walls. But do you have a link to data?
I think your approach would be a likely to spread the diseases as to eliminate them.
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Except for the nearly two hundred thousand people that did.
My assertion was not that nobody survived it was that nothing within a mile of the blast survived.
Funny how that happens (Score:3)
Like VOA warning "there might be 'local' opposition to this fancy new naval base you're offering Russia [voanews.com]" and then suddenly a general goes rogue and starts shooting up the government.
Did we fund that Biolab too? (Score:1)
?
most of those have vaccines (Score:1)
For some odd reason, I seem to recall pl lying on your deathbed, asking for a vaccine. Sounds so familiar.
WMDs? (Score:2)
Where is GWB when you need him?
Let me guess who is going to fix this? (Score:2)
Probably built with US dollars (Score:1)
$10 says Fauci was somewhere in charge of the funding, as well.
What's next, nuclear research lab in Mogadishu?