US official: Russian invasion of Ukraine risks release of dangerous pathogens
Posted on 03/08/2022 7:28:28 PM PST by BenLurkin
The Russian invasion of Ukraine may put at risk a network of US-linked labs in Ukraine that work with dangerous pathogens...
The US government maintains that they are public and animal health labs operated by host countries.
[Robert Pope, the director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program]said the labs conduct peaceful scientific research and disease surveillance. Outside experts have also said Pope’s program is not a covert bioweapons operation.
While the United States isn’t maintaining bioweapons facilities, Pope said, war could put pathogen collections in Ukraine at risk.
The pathogens in Ukrainian labs vary by facility, Pope said, but some can be characterized as presenting a concern in the Ukrainian environment. As an example, he cited African swine fever virus, which is highly contagious in pigs and has caused hundreds of outbreaks in Ukraine since 2012. Some labs, he said, may hold pathogen strains left over from the Soviet bioweapons program, preserved in freezers for research purposes.
The program is encouraging host countries to reduce the scope of their pathogen holdings to as small of a collection as necessary for legitimate scientific research, Pope said.
This work, Pope said, continued in Ukraine until recently. “They have more pathogens in more places than we recommend,” he said. The program had been helping Ukrainian researchers sift through their frozen pathogen collections, with the goal of persuading the Ukrainians to preserve their genetic information of samples via sequencing before destroying the live samples.
Some Ukrainian labs, like the Ukrainian Ministry of Health’s Public Health Center, Pope said, are major facilities, others small. Some are new, while others date back to the Soviet-era and the country’s bioweapons program.
The US government has worked with 26 facilities in Ukraine. Before the invasion, the program provided direct material support to six Ukrainian labs.
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