The A’s (Anthrax and Antibiotics), B’s (Bio-Tech and Bio-War)

The A’s (Anthrax and Antibiotics), B’s (Bio-Tech and Bio-War),
and C’s (a Cooperative View of Current Events)
by Robyn Seydel

In the months since the mid-September tragedy, people across the nation are having to make some hard decisions about security, civil rights, human rights, democracy, and freedom, often without adequate information.

While the corporate media continues to feed our fears with sensationalist stories, it is clear that differing opinions and public dialogue, a hallmark of a truly strong democracy, are nowhere to be seen. Information selection and reporting by the mainstream media in support of a military industrial agenda is the order of the day: and not at all surprising, in light of the fact major defense contractors, including General Electric and Westinghouse, own many of the media outlets.

While recession has hit hard here at home and is threatening the world economy, some corporations are benefiting greatly from “America’s New War,” as the pundits have dubbed it.

Anthrax and irradiation is a case in point. While safe handling and delivery of the mail and protection of postal workers is paramount, the nuclear industry is crowing at the sudden acceptance of irradiation technology. The health and environmental threats to surrounding neighborhoods, postal workers and the mail are not being addressed in the rush to use a technology that may present more problems than it solves.

According to Dr. Samuel Baron, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, “The spores are resistant to heat, cold, irradiation desiccation and disinfectants.”

Surrounded by numerous thick layers of material, including protein and calcium, anthrax endospores are impervious to irradiation; and, according to
the U.S. Department of Defense official anthrax information website, “can remain dormant for decades.” So resistant to radiation is anthrax that the Clinton administration reportedly decided against using nuclear materials in certain weapon designs, specifically because they would not be able to defend against an incoming missile carrying pounds of the spores.

A corporation with a cozy relationship with the Department of Defense, Titan/SureBeam, has been chosen based on their pronouncements that irradiation will kill anthrax spores. It should be noted the Titan/SureBeam Corporation is currently under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission for misleading advertising and false labeling of their technology. They have consistently called their irradiation process “electronic pasteurization” or “cold pasteurization,” a labeling that the Department of Agriculture calls “misleading.” Since mid-September, Titan/Surebeam has received over 700 million dollars in government contracts.

Bio-Tech, Bio-War

While the Administration pushes Congress for fast track approval for bio-tech foods in world free trade agreements, tightening corporate control of agriculture, it has steadfastly refused international biological weapons control treaties.

As reported by the Agency France Press, tweaking of bacterial and viral DNA could create an agent far more devastating than the anthrax we now face. Some of the possibilities quoted in the international press include antibiotic resistant plague, tuberculosis and intestinal germs, genetically modified killer flu strains, and pathogen cocktails, including a mixture of smallpox and ebola.

It is expected that in the next few years the genetic codes of as many as 70 pathogens could be cracked. Already in the public domain are the genome of cholera, leprosy, plague and TB.

Jeremy Rifkin, in articles in both the London Times and the Baltimore Sun, points to biotechnology as the “poor man’s nuclear bomb” and notes that “thousands of graduate students in laboratories around the world are knowledgeable enough in the rudimentary uses… to design such weapons… with as little as $10,000 worth of ‘off-the-shelf’ equipment” and notes that “it is widely acknowledged that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between defensive and offensive research in the field.”

Already researchers have unintentionally created “superbugs.” The first, created by Willem Stemmer, chief scientist for Maxgen, was a strain of e-coli that was 32,000 times more resistant to the antibiotic used for treatment than conventional strains.

Also in Australia, in a creation that received widespread publicity last January, two scientists created a vicious strain of mousepox. Although both creations have been destroyed, it points out that any geneticist “with an advanced degree and lots of money could use this already available data to create new, horrifyingly virulent agents.” (Rifkin)

Native Americans, recipients of smallpox blankets, were the first to experience US use of biological warfare. During the last century, the U.S. was among seven nations, including Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Iraq that embarked on programs to weaponize killer agents.

The White House stunned the world in its refusal to agree to tougher standards at last summer’s meeting on the 1972 Biological Toxin Weapons Convention, stating that the “trade secrets” of its pharmaceutical and biotech industries would be compromised. The outcome of this November’s meeting on the BTWC will be most interesting.

On Antibiotics

The White House upheld Bayer’s patent rights on the antibiotic Cipro, during the height of the anthrax scare and Bayer did its part for the war effort by selling Cipro to the government at reduced prices.

However, on October 3rd, the International Herald Tribune reported that the company sealed a deal to become the world’s second largest agro/life science company (behind Syngenta AG of Switzerland) with its 7.25 billion dollar purchase of Aventis CropScience.

Bayer stated that it will not take on any liability for the lawsuits pending from last year’s StarLink disaster, when hundreds of food products were contaminated with the company’s Bt corn that had not been approved for human consumption.

As reported by Ellen K. Silbergeld, a professor of epi-demiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and Polly Walker, associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future on November 3, in the New York Times, Cipro is “in danger of becoming a casualty” of antibiotic resistance. Bayer, the maker of Cipro, also sells a chemically similar drug called Baytril, which is used in large-scale poultry production worldwide. The widespread use of Baytril in chickens has already been shown to decrease Cipro’s effectiveness in humans for some types of infections.

While Bayer recommends that Baytril be used only to treat infected poultry and says it “poses no threat to public health,” it is common practice in the poultry industry to add Baytril to drinking water during the last weeks of a flock’s life, even if no disease has been diagnosed. Again quoting the New York Times story, “Last year, the FDA asked Bayer and Abbott Laboratories, the two producers of the chicken drug, to withdraw their Cipro-like antibiotics from agricultural use voluntarily. Abbott agreed. Bayer did not.”

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, as much as 70 percent of all antibiotics produced in the United States are fed to healthy livestock for “growth promotion”; to increase their weight for market. Not only does this reduce their effectiveness in animals; it poses a real danger to humans.”

In related news, researchers have found that the “aad” gene found in both Bolgard (insect resistant) and Monsanto’s herbicide resistant genetically engineered cotton can build resistance to antibiotics like streptomycin and spectinomycin, making the treatment of diseases like TB and gonorrhea less effective. The antibiotics are used as marker genes in both cottons, and there is a possibility that the “aad” gene can be transferred to human pathogens.

Researchers believe that, as these antibiotic marker genes are present in every cell of the engineered plant, when such food is ingested, the antibiotic resistance gene is also ingested. Such genes can be transferred to bacteria in the guts of animals or humans, or to bacteria in the environment, and diseases could become resistant to many important antibiotic drugs.

In case of cotton, cottonseed oil routinely used in fast food, cotton meal added to cattle feed, clinical cotton, tampons, sanitary napkins, diapers, dressing bandage and other cottons are of concern.
While it is clear that personal and national protections are necessary, it is also clear that once again, war is good business, and the current administration is taking care of business.