Death threat: BioPro in the American way

Against the background of the rough political fights of the last months connected with the Russian presidential elections, situation round Syria, the economic crisis in the eurozone and the creation of global system of antimissile defence by the Americans, other important questions also directly concerning with the national interests of our state completely disappeared from the vision field of mass media. The matter is about the problems of biological safety ensuring which traditionally unfairly occupy one of the last places in the list of priority problems of the Russian management.

At first sight, the situation in this sphere isn't too bad. Uninitiated hardly will see the threats here comparable, for example, to the crisis of the European financial system. And only message on the renewed outbreaks of the African plague of pigs in various regions of Russia, frequent cases of poliomyelitis and the measles, experiences proceeding in the separate countries, over a virus of bird flu, developing in a complete picture, set thinking the narrow circle of experts about what casual character is carried by these events and whether our health system in its present condition is capable to cope with real and potential threats of biological safety of the state.

Now the situation in the country looks so that the politicians forgot about contents of such documents as “Bases of state policy in the field of chemical and biological safety ensuring of the Russian Federation for the period till 2010 and further prospect” and the Decree of the President of Russia “Of the strategy of national security of the Russian Federation till 2020” in which the biological safety ensuring of the country is defined as one of the most important directions of strengthening of national security.

The calmness of the domestic officials is especially surprising against the extremely disturbing information on an ambiguous state of affairs with counteraction to biological threats not only at our next neighbors, but also in such “exemplary” state in every respect as the USA.

According to experts’ statements, the internal threat increases in the USA which proceeds from activity of own scientific institutions which have acquired the right to work with “list” biological agents from the state. According to the published data, the USA had officially more than 400 such establishments as of 2006. Special concern is caused with that process of expansion of bio-dangerous laboratory base left from under control of the authorities. Thus even FBI can't precisely define the number of laboratories of high level of bio-safety, operating in the country.

Experts draw a conclusion that the centers, created to solve the counteraction problems to bioterrorism, became the source of new threats and not only in scales of the USA. Owing to weak control, there were possible facts of loss and theft of dangerous microbes and viruses, acts of “post” bioterrorism with the use of the causative agent of anthrax, the attempt of receiving access to technologies and dangerous activators from mentally unbalanced citizens, criminal and other socially dangerous persons.

Similar “liberties” are not only an internal affair of the USA, but also a subject of attention of international law.

The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) provided the institute of confidence-building measures assuming the annual announcement by the participating states about the content of the bacteriological researches and the corresponding scientific objects. This mechanism is actually unique significant instrument of providing at least relative transparency of carried-out works. The American side intentionally allows the discrepancy and distortion in the declarations from year to year. Thus the quantity of the objects which are directly related to programs of the Ministry of Defence of the USA in the field of biological protection is artificially underestimated.

Similar “errors” could be neglected, if not the disturbing messages on works of the number of the American research establishments being, to put it mildly, on the verge of violation of Article 1 of BTWC. So, in 2003 the publication of the patent demand for the special device for dispersion of not lethal means of defeat with transfer of rights of intellectual property to land forces of the USA received a big public response. The device is intended for the statement of smoke screens, firefighting, and also for application of chemical and biological agents. Comments are excessive!

On this background the works on clarification of the mechanism of virus of flu H5N1transfer look absolutely menacing. The genome of notorious virus “Spaniard” is restored at the Institute of pathology of the Armed Forces of the USA and the works of the Australian scientists on increase of virulence of the causative agent of mice smallpox are successfully repeated at Saint-Louis University. The experiments on creation of artificially synthesized virus of natural smallpox are made at the university of Pennsylvania State. Thus, contrary to BTWC, this exclusively dangerous to all mankind work isn't supervised by the world community at all.

In the euphoria condition from world hegemony, the Americans prefer not to execute the Convention requirements and to establish own mechanisms of total control of microbiological researches in the world. For each country captured by the program “Joint biological obligations”, the individual plan of work is made, the responsibility for material security of its performance is differentiated, the crushing projects in the political and scientific relation are imposed.

The appropriation of funds by the Americans for them is connected with implementation of all shown requirements the scale of which, as a rule, is non-comparable to volume of the represented help. Thus the final recipient of all scientific results, the materials, almost useful development and data of sanitary-and-epidemiologic supervision is the Pentagon. Similar practice of achievement of “transparency” of biological researches in the various countries was developed by the USA at the time of cold war. Then Brazil, Honduras, Ghana, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Peru, Thailand, Germany, Sweden, South Korea and Japan got under the American “head” of bio-safety.

In the mid-nineties, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had imprudence to send the request for the organization of visit of two American laboratories for check of compliance of their real activity to State department within the tripartite agreement between the Russian Federation, the USA and Great Britain. The refusal of Washington on implementation of obligations under the tripartite agreement and in the subsequent termination of work over improvement of the mechanism of control of biological researches became reaction to it.

The experts saw desire of the USA in this demarche to leave BTWC regime and to create own global system of protection against the biological weapon – peculiar BioPro.

Since 1992, the territories of the countries of the former USSR got to the sphere of the BioPro. In Washington they are traditionally considered as a potential source of dangerous pathogens and technologies of creation of the bio-weapon and also the experts possessing the corresponding theoretical preparation and practical skills. Now the partners of the USA within this program are the sovereign states on the perimeter of Russia: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. In Kyrgyzstan the general control of a turn in the country of potentially dangerous biomaterials is carried out by Canada.

According to foreign experts, “awning” of BioPro should extend for the limits of the CIS in the long term. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burundi, Kenya and Uganda, and further India, Iraq, Tanzania and the Republic of South Africa should get to a zone of its covering. The general expenses of the Pentagon on these purposes will make more than 260 million dollars in 2012.

The USA doesn't hide satisfaction already with the reached results: Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan have transferred the national collections of pathogenic microorganisms to Institute of pathology of the Armed Forces of the USA. Tbilisi presented to the Americans all collections of strains of anthrax, brucellosis, plague and tularemia, Baku “shared” with unique strains of plague, anthrax, cholera and other dangerous diseases, Astana provided a collection of strains of plague and anthrax.

Thus the experts speak about reorientation of the former Soviet republics to the American standards of sanitary-and-epidemiologic supervision and proceeding creation of the centers of the biological monitoring by them supervised by the USA. In other words, our next neighbors assign to the Americans the right to estimate the level of biological threats in the territory and to make decisions on application of the appropriate measures of counteraction.

It would seem, similar eagerness of Washington in safety from biological threats should only please as it is paid by the American taxpayers. However many experts see serious threat in it.

For example, the data which have appeared in the press on functioning of the Georgian-American laboratory in Alekseyevka and led by the former head of an intelligence service of Georgia of A.Zhvania, specified that their fears aren't groundless point. Thus its work is supervised personally by the adviser of the Minister of Defence of the USA for nuclear, chemical and defensive programs E.Weber. It is known that the military personnel of army of the USA works in this center and the experiences are carried out in the conditions of the strictest privacy. The Armenian Erkramas edition assumes that the applied researches on fighting application of biological striking means are conducted in laboratory.

The chief sanitary inspector of Russia G. Onishchenko spoke in one of recent performances about the participation of the Georgian-American center in Alekseyevka to distribution of a virus of the African plague of pigs in the Russian regions. Two most probable versions are put forward by experts in this situation: the anthropogenic failure which has entailed the leakage of a gene-modified strain and intended actions of Georgia (for example, dumping of carcasses of the pigs who have lost from a virus to the Inguri river), having for an object the drawing of an ecological damage of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Russia.

Thus the center in Alekseyevka is far not the unique establishment near the borders of Russia where the Americans can carry out the researches in the field of bio-weapon creation. There were messages in a foreign press on creation of similar laboratories on the basis of anti-plague stations in Baku and Simferopol and also in the Kazakhstan scientific center of quarantine and zoonotic infections by M. Aykimbayev in Alma-Ata.

If to compare the danger to Russia from an invention of the USA to placement in Europe the item regions of PRO with the results of realization of programs components “Joint reduction of threat” and “Joint biological obligations”, it is possible to see that there is a lot of general between them. The distinction is only that the Russian side reacts to them. The best forces of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defence are thrown to the first direction and other task excites while only the certain experts and analysts.