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Medicine The Military

Live Anthrax Shipped Accidentally To S Korea and US Labs 67

New submitter hamsterz1 writes: U.S. Officials say that the military mistakenly sent live anthrax to laboratories in nine states and an air base in South Korea, after apparently failing to properly inactivate the bacteria. Four lab workers in the United States and up to 22 overseas have been given precautionary medical treatment. The CDC is investigating the incident and Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren says, "Out of an abundance of caution, [the Defence Department] has stopped the shipment of this material from its labs pending completion of the investigation."
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Live Anthrax Shipped Accidentally To S Korea and US Labs

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  • by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Thursday May 28, 2015 @06:23PM (#49794937)
    it would be a shame if something.....
  • by Anonymous Coward
    USPS would have misdelivered it.
  • by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Thursday May 28, 2015 @06:33PM (#49795017) Homepage Journal
    You'd think NOT GETTING ANTHRAX would be an effective incentive for your lab monkeys to follow the lab's safety protocols. Is it really THAT depressing a workplace environment?
    "Hey Bob! Looks like we need to ship some anthrax to Korea."
    "Ok! Did you make sure it wouldn't kill us before we start handling the samples."
    "Does it really matter?"
    "... No... I guess not..."
    • Reminds me of the opening scene of 'The Stand' when everybody is panicking behind locked doors and one guy makes a run for it with his family

      Just in this version, nobody is panicking and the vehicle making a run for it is the Fedex van

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Reminds me of typical plausible deniability. Accidentally let out some undeniably US military weapons grade anthrax, so that some can disappear before the rest is recovered and then be used in a false flag event. So Jade Helm, the occupation of hostile cities with the active suppression and elimination of an opposed civilian population and now the wandering around of false flag fit material to prompt the US of Jade Helm training. So hmm, Ukraine, Iran or Venezuela, of course Jade Helm, (green as in jungle

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It is government workers. You know, the stupidest of the stupidest combined with top scores in arrogance.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Should have mailed the anthrax to David Cameron instead.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I'd like to know why Slashdot is so far behind the curve on this story. Soylent picked it up this morning, almost twelve hours ago, and they're usually the last to approve anything. Why isn't Slashdot running a crucial story on SourceForge tampering with Open Source software and inserting adware/malware in total violation of the trust that it earned through the years?

      • by Khyber ( 864651 )

        Because Slashdot Media, owner of SourceForge, doesn't want it getting out.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Because Slashdot Media, owner of SourceForge, doesn't want it getting out.

          Indeed, which is why it's so damn stupid. I'd wager the people who read Slashdot exclusively and don't hear anything from any other tech sites is vanishingly small nowadays. This news has spread quite a bit. Slashdot Media can't exactly pretend that people won't find out independently. They have very little influence in the tech news arena anymore.

          The best thing they could do is post the story with an impartial, emotionally-detached s

          • by Khyber ( 864651 )

            " I'd wager the people who read Slashdot exclusively and don't hear anything from any other tech sites is vanishingly small nowadays."

            Yup. Slashdot has very few exclusives. To think they could keep this under wraps is bullshit.

  • by countSudoku() ( 1047544 ) on Thursday May 28, 2015 @06:46PM (#49795083) Homepage

    You guys, Anthrax Live is pretty fucking awesome! Their shows can get loud, but they play all... oh, not the band. Never mind.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Morons.

    additional text

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Why do we have Anthrax? Why is it even possible to be shipped anywhere? Are we preparing a biological weapon? Come on!

    • They use killed anthrax to test detectors that can 'sniff' it out

    • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      The US has officially weaponized anthrax without violating any treaties. The official story is that they needed to weaponize it to develop effective countermeasures. It's not a biological weapon. It's a biological defense. It's just indistinguishable from the weapon of the same name.
  • Caution (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Thursday May 28, 2015 @07:45PM (#49795343)

    Stopping shipments sound like the minimum of caution, not an "abundance".

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      This is the government. Loss of reality, no common sense, and grand delusions about their own skill and capabilities is standard.

  • According to half the people here on Slashdot, the solution to any and all problems is to have another federal government department do _something_. Do what? Anything, really, as long as they do _something_. These guys are their great hope, people so dense they mail out live anthrax all over the place. Good luck getting them to solve all of your problems.

  • I hope they catch those terrorists who were attacking our bases, and giving biological weapons to our enemies. No doubt they'll spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

    • Yeah, after what they did to that guy who merely had a pressure cooker in his car, I can't imagine what they'd to to guys dealing with real live anthrax.

  • Now we can't use it for false flag operations : (

  • Great, Now we're at war with SOUTH Korea and are all going to die of anthrax.

    Thanks Obama

  • I absolutely love the example of how news reports represent things.

    This morning they started out "Live anthrax shipped to nine labs and Korea". The quotes talk about an abundance of caution and that spores were "detected". Since I happen to have read about it before, I already knew live anthrax is already shipped around the world in sheep and other livestock. So I wondered why the media would be on this so much.

    Later in the day, different headlines "Live anthrax detected in possibly ten labs".

    Now at th

  • lack of nuclear safe guards, and it's very close to the same thing.

    But we will (and should), as if nothing had happened.

    • Have you seen the Soviet's bio-weopons program? Its a bunch of old refridgerators filled with tupperware of plague, tuleremia, anthrax, etc. Its not locked or guarded or anything. I think we can safely continue to condemn the Soviets.
      • Have you seen the Soviet's bio-weopons program? Its a bunch of old refridgerators filled with tupperware of plague, tuleremia, anthrax, etc. Its not locked or guarded or anything. I think we can safely continue to condemn the Soviets.

        No, can't say I have, yet certainly expected a level of expertise behind them

  • If chemical and bacterial warfare have been banned, the why do we still have it?
  • They still require mucus surface or wound. And they may have been partially weakened by the ineffective sterialization procedure.
    On the other hand spores, enhanced by a combined aerosol are mire effective infecting people. Apparantly fromthe 2001 incident, it takes a certain skill to do this.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke

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