Dangerous, Evil, Stupid -- Pick Three

[filkertom]

The Plum Island Animal Disease Center, an isolated offshore virus research lab whose name you may know from The Silence of the Lambs, is to be relocated to the US mainland by The Gang That Couldn't Govern Straight.

So. Hoof or mouth?

Comments

[madfilkentist]

They should move it to Washington, D.C. Everyone there already has foot-in-mouth disease anyway.

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

After I win the lottery and move to Tahiti, please.

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

the key point in that article is "it will mean jobs" spoken by the Repub. idiot from KS who once said that the very scenario he supports would end up a mess.

Also read as: "I'm up for re-election and there's a huge slump in the economy. What to do?"

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

I'll take hoof - I can always build a Steampunk Wheelchair. ;-)

In all seriousness this sort of stupidity is beyond the pale for me. We're already to the population point, in my opinion, that a good pandemic is easily within reach. :-( We just need a disease vector.

And judging by the average sheeple I meet on the street we aren't getting any cleaner as a society...

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Do. Not. Tempt. The. Geneticist.

[rsmit212.livejournal.com]

How else will Captain Trips be released? "My life for you!"

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

I can't wait for The Stand comic book series to come out. Hopefully they will get Randall Flagg right in this one. He is a walking shadow according to the book, so don't make him as white as possible as they did in the TV mini-series. If he is supposed to be a very dark skinned black man, it is NOT a racist thing, that is just how the chacater is. Grow up, people, and stop looking for problems where there aren't any! (sorry for the rant, it was one of two things that the mini-series really got wrong, the other was that Trashcan Man was written as Bobcat Goldwait, so why not cast him? He definately was NOT Max Headroom! :-)

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

FWIW, Stephen King mentioned in the foreword to at least one of the editions of _The Stand_ that he would kind of like to cast Christopher Walken (heh) as Flagg. I don't think of Flagg's skin as necessarily being black, just that the character is always in shadow (or seems so, somehow).

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Isolated, offshore?

Well, there isn't a road to Plum Island, but it is only about a mile or two from there to Orient Point, LI. Ferries from LI to Connecticut pass right by Plum Island many times a day. We aren't talking about a remote location, or something.

There are two basic ways pathogens from a laboratory can get to the world - on the persons of workers, or airborne. For the former, sea barriers are not an issue - it does not matter if the workers get in a car or on a boat, they're still carrying pathogens. For the latter, Plum Island is already not far enough away to provide any real protection, especially considering how windy Long Island Sound and Gardner's Bay tend to be.

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

Is this run by the Umbrella Corporation or something?

I always thought Resident Evil and its derivatives were nothing more than a slaughterfest for the gorehounds, but reading the Wikipedia description of the Umbrella Corporation makes it sound like a prime-time soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty.

Which is, by the way, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_Corporation

[bayushisan.livejournal.com]

Go back and watch the third season of Babylon 5. The correlation between what JMS wrote and a lot of the things we've heard from the Bush administration are eerily similair and makes me wonder if JMS could see the future.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

The whole series is eerily prescient in some ways. I noticed that recently the last time I watched it all again.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

The only thing I can't figure out is how he knew to cast someone as President Clark who so strongly resembles President Cheney. (font whited out for spoilers)

[maiac.livejournal.com]

My immediate thought when I saw the story was, "Cui bono?"

Translation: My guess is they're giving Halliburton the contract to build the facility, and Blackwater the contract to provide security when it's built.

[hyrkanian.livejournal.com]

We looked at property for sale around Buttner, NC but are waiting to see if the lab gets moved there before we do more than look. There are signs on a lot of lawns around there saying "No Bio Disease Lab."

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

As as I said in another blog about this:
Considering that the latest outbreak of foot&mouth in Britain was the result of a stopped up drain in the lab responsible for making the vaccine... eventual loss of containment is inevitable.

Problem is, as hard as it was to get it under control here, with your countries vast open fields and huge herds of cattle intermixing with wild and/or feral vectors [like deer] and the utter dependence you have on road transport, it would be impossible to contain once it got out.

As such, the worst case scenarios they posit in that article, would probably be a gross understatement. [for a start, if you examine their underlying assumptions, they assumed that they recognised there was an out-break right from the start..and that no-one failed to recognise it, or tried hiding it, or covering up the fact their cattle were diseased.]

[gorgeousgary]

Not that I want to defend the Bush Administration, but I don't really see this as that big an issue. Assuming the Wikipedia article is correct, isn't even the highest Biological Level research--only BL-3, not BL-4 (which is stuff like in The Stand). As the CNN article said (and the Wikipedia), there are already a bunch of facilities around the US doing this sort of work. They mentioned Ft. Detrick (about 30 minutes up the road from us); I recall back about three engineering firms ago the company did some work for another USDA facility in Iowa that did have BL-4 facilities.

[tropism.livejournal.com]

Well, first off, by definition, a disease which doesn't infect humans wouldn't require BL-4 facilities, even if it made the infected cows explode.

Second, this is the only facility in the US which handles hoof-and-mouth, a particularly nasty little disease which, if there was a moderate-sized outbreak, would lead to the decimation of the livestock industry in the US. It can be transmitted by deer and rats, the former of which can range widely and the latter of which are pandemic. Plum Island was chosen as a facility to handle this disease for two main reasons: one, it's only accessible by boat or plane, and two, there's no real livestock industry on Long Island. The fact that the disease doesn't generally get transmitted to humans makes it more of a problem, containment-wise; you might not find out about a breach for weeks. Plum Island contains things like rats and mice which might get into the facility simply because it's an island. And if the disease did get out, frankly, Long Island would be the best place for it to happen, as cases would start showing up on the relatively-sparsely-populated East End. (In this case, the human population isn't a target, it's a disease vector.)

"The Homeland Security Department says laboratory animals would not be corralled outside the new facility, and they would not come into contact with local livestock."

Bullshit. Oh, sure, they might not come in contact with livestock, but can you guarantee that some rat doesn't wind up walking through some garbage or something and then tracking it outside? See, with Plum Island, that just means that their rat population might take a bit of a hit. If the facility's located down south somewhere, though, our agricultural industry could be fuuuuuuuuucked.

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

For God's sake... Where are these people's senses of SHAME?