The development agreement says that after the plague vaccine is discontinued, Miles will no longer use class 3 organisms (defined as "agents that can cause disease with serious or lethal consequences.") The company will limit itself to the use of class 1 ("organisms that do not cause disease in healthy humans") or class 2 (moderate risk agents "associated with human disease of varying severity.") That is, unless Miles decides at a later date to resume the use of class 3 agents, in which case' they will "propose an amendment to the development agreement and will provide for a City consultant to evaluate biosafety issues related to the proposed change."
Assuming they don't get a later amendment permitting the more lethal class 3 agents, what exactly are the class 2 agents that they might be using? In the EIR, they talk a lot about Epstein Barr, although polio virus and rabies virus are also mentioned as currently being used. In response to a citizen's request for further clarification about class 2, the final EIR gives some more examples from the NIH list: Hepatitis A, B, and C, Bacillus anthracis, Legionella pneumophila, etc. The last two stick in my mind. Legion ella pneumophila. Is that the same as Legionnaire's Disease? Wasn't there just a story, in the Bay Area headlines for days, about a mass outbreak of that disease in a Richmond Social Security building that resulted in at least one death? I located the initial story in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Legionnaire's Disease is a type of pneumonia that was first identified after a sudden, virulent outbreak of the disease hit veterans at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in 1976. More than 200 convention-goers became ill. and 34 died. They named the disease Legionella pneumophila..." In both the Philadelphia and California cases, the disease was believed to have spread through contaminated air ducts in the buildings.
And Bacillus anthracis? Where had I been reading about that? I found a New York Times article dated November 29, 1988, written by Leonard Cole, a Rutgers faculty member who also wrote a book called Clouds of Secrecy, about the secret open air testing the Army has conducted over various U.S. cities as part of their germ warfare research program. According to the article, in 1950, the Army sprayed a large amount of the supposedly harmless bacteria Serratia marcescens over the Bay Area. A number of people in San Francisco became ill with heart and urinary tract infections caused by the same rare bacteria, and one of them died. "Unaware of the Army's test, doctors in San Francisco wrote about the unusual Serratia infections in a medical journal. They had never before encountered such an out-break.
Although the infections began three days after the spraying, the Army decided the timing was 'apparently coincidental' and that testing should continue. Neither then nor in later tests has the Army monitored the health of people exposed retired major general, William M. Creasy, commander of the testing program in the 1950s arid 1960s, testified in a court trial in 1981 that the public was kept in the dark in order to avoid panic. Testing in cities was necessary, he said, because biological warfare agents are 'designed to work against people, and you have to test them in the kind of places where people live and work." (The information about those tests finally became public in the 1970s through the Freedom of Information Act.)
Cole also writes that since 1979, the Army has conducted more than 170 open air tests at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. "The Amy admits it is releasing a bacteria called Bacillus subtilis in Utah from 'time to time, to simulate biological warfare attacks with the more lethal Bacillus anthracis, which causes anthrax." This "class 2" Bacillus anthracis is so deadly it can't even be used in testing at the Dugway Proving Ground, the notorious site of numerous experiments in chemical and biological warfare research. It causes anthrax, the same organism whose accidental release in the Soviet Union was described as a "biological Chernobyl."
It may be true that Miles Cutter's contracts with the Defense Dept. do not technically fall into the category of biological warfare research. However, one can't help but feel-in light of the 120,000 lbs. or more of infectious waste that Miles can be expected to incinerate in East Oakland every month, the presumed increase in the release of cancer-causing chemicals into the air in West Berkeley, the 67 percent likelihood of a 7.0 or greater earthquake in the Bay Area in the next 30 years, and Miles Cutter's use of organisms for which there are no known antidotes-that the East Bay is about to be subjected to a new kind of "open air experiment" of unprecedented proportions.
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