Page 36 - Bioterrorism

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Japan intended to bring back to Japan the families of many of its staff working around the world
because of the threat of a bird flu pandemic.

“Panasonic to fly home workers’ families over bird flu fears
Feb 9, 2009

TOKYO (AFP) — Panasonic Corp. has ordered Japanese employees in some foreign countries to
send their families home to Japan in preparation for a possible bird flu pandemic, a spokesman
said Tuesday.”

The firm decided to take the rare measure “well ahead of possible confusion at the outbreak of a
global pandemic,” he said.

th
The Times of India reported on March 6 , 2009, that a pandemic was nearly triggered as a result
of Baxter’s actions. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Health--Science/Science/Virus-mix-up-by-
lab-could-have-resulted-in-pandemic/articleshow/4230882.cms

“It's emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab last year
and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before
anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human
strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.

Last December, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary
human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in
Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, ferrets
inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1, which Baxter
uses to make vaccine. The two seem to have been mixed in error.

Markus Reinhard of Baxter says no one was infected because the H3N2 was handled at a high
level of containment. But Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus University in the Netherlands says: "We need
to go to great lengths to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen."

Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire
consequences.“

It needs to be stressed that the bird flu virus was developed in US military laboratories from 1995
onwards by researchers who reconstructed the genetic code of the Spanish Flu pandemic virus of
1918-1919.

So, using the argument that they need to find an antidote to the lethal bird flu virus, researchers
have actually resurrected this lethal bird flu virus and created the danger in the first place, and
with funds provided by organisations such as WHO.

“Reviving the Spanish Flu virus is a recipe for a catastrophe. It could put any attack using anthrax
or the plague in the shade, “ said Jan van Aken, head of the German section of the Sunshine
Project.

In the summer of 2008, US researchers found that this newly reconstructed lethal bird flu virus
could be mixed with ordinary human flu virus in laboratory conditions and so, in theory, could
acquire easy human-to-human transmissibility.

It was precisely this very virus, a mix of a lethal H5N1 bird flu virus and an ordinary human flu
H3N2 virus that Baxter manufactured in its laboratory in Orth/Donau in December 2008, and then