03.27.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 8:50 am by George Smith
Soligenix, the old Alliance for Biosecurity firm that occasionally appears on the blog, published a statement on its activities in the year 2011 today.
A number of things stick out.
First, the company’s profit this year resulted all from a “non-refundable” cash payment, licensing purchase by a firm that must now consider itself extremely unlucky, Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals.
“The increase in revenues was a result of a $5.0 million non-refundable license fee from Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Sigma-Tau) in connection with the expansion of Soligenix’s existing North American commercialization rights to orBec …” reads the Soligenix statement.
“Christopher J. Schaber, PhD, President and Chief Executive Officer of Soligenix stated, ‘In 2011 we saw the unfortunate stoppage of our Phase 3 trial of orBec …’ ” it reads further on.
Oof, Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals! They bought busted goods and there’s no warranty.
[We] have restructured the organization by decreasing headcount with a continued focus on cash management and research …” continues the Soligenix report.
The firm has also moved onward with research on development of anti-radiation sickness medicine.
Sadly, this is not good news for dogs.
“On February 21, 2012, the Company announced further promising results from its continuing preclinical study of SGX202 (oral BDP) in a canine gastrointestinal acute radiation syndrome (GI ARS) model,” states the Soligenix missive. “The new study results indicate that dogs treated with SGX202 starting 24 hours after exposure to lethal doses of total body irradiation (TBI -1.61%, news) demonstrated statistically significant (p=0.04) improvement in survival when compared to control dogs …”
Grim reading. Particularly when considering the firm’s track record of unparalleled and glorious success.
Soligenix, formerly DOR BioPharma, is a company that pretty much exists because of the war on terror. Post anthrax, funding for bioterror defense took off.
Soligenix acquired licensing for the development, testing and manufacture of a vaccine for ricin from a researcher who had come up with it as a result of her work looking at the poison from the standpoint of a potential use in cancer treatment.
However, while a totally go-go industry through the middle of the decade, some funding for bioterror defense has now fallen by the wayside, due to the the economic crash of 2008, resulting austerity, and disinterest. Most of the companies in the old Alliance for Biosecurity have languished, producing nothing.
A huge bioterror defense research and vaccine facility planned for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center championed by Tara O’Toole, old leader of biodefense lobbying (now at DHS) wound up canceled. UPMC’s bioterror defense program seems to have other troubles, too.
The ricin vaccine, although still the subject of some press releases, is — for practical purposes — orphaned for now.
Work on anthrax remains protected. However, the dirty tricks competition between the companies fighting over the taxpayer’s money has virtually guaranteed it produces nothing, corporate welfare for one or two stagnant firms.
Earlier this year, DD blog posted on Soligenix’s efforts to prop up its stock price after news of cancellation of trials for one of its potential products rendered it virtually worthless.
Stock slump: Bioterror defense company Soligenix falls on hard times.
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02.27.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 12:02 pm by George Smith
Today, from the newspaper of Denton, TX, a story mentioning how the ricin vaccine fell in and out of favor.
Readers of the blog know it as the always coming but never arriving product of Soligenix, a now near worthless company from the old Alliance for Biosecurity. DD blog last mentioned the firm here.
Before 9/11 there was virtually no interest in a ricin vaccine. The main reason for this is that no one actually needs such a thing except those who research ricin, or the few weird crazies every year who pound castor seeds.
However, after 9/11 and anthrax, funding for bioterror research and nostrums to be used against all the diseases and toxins said to be about to descend upon us exploded.
Over ten years on, with little to show for any of it, some of the research and firms involved have hit a brick wall. Some, although not all, are out of favor. Budgets are busted and the country often has other newer problems to spend money on.
The ricin vaccine came out of research into using the toxin in targeted chemotherapy against certain cancers. And the interesting part is excerpted:
Less than a half-hour drive down the freeway from Sellers’ oncology treatments, researchers at the Cancer Immunology Center in Dallas search for a cure for cancer. Despite the physical proximity, Sellers and other chemotherapy patients are more than a decade displaced from the work of researchers down the road.
As professor and researcher, Dr. Ellen Vitetta, the immunology center’s director, has worked to discover new treatments for an array of incurable diseases for more than three decades. In 2000, after more than a decade of research to genetically engineer and modify a toxin to target tumor cells, her team realized the cancer research had brought them to the doorstep of a vaccine for something else — ricin, an extremely toxic protein found in the castor bean.
While continuing the tumor-targeting research, Vitetta’s team hoped government interest in the vaccine would lead to an increase in grant money that could be applied toward the lab’s primary goal of cancer research. For a while, it did.
But after 12 years, numerous papers and two clinical trials, both the vaccine and the cancer treatments that inspired it sit on freezer shelves in the Dallas lab — a sort of purgatory for promising research that falls out of favor, Vitetta says.
“If I can’t get money for [the research] and I can’t get money for the trials, there’s no choice but to hang it up and let it sit until it comes back into vogue again,??? she says.
In the freezer room at Vitetta’s lab, half a dozen 6-foot-tall freezers sit side by side, housing decades of unfunded work at 80 degrees below zero, hoping at some point in the future to be resuscitated. Some drugs, like the poison vaccine, show promise in clinical trials but become victims of federal funding cuts that leave the center no choice but to consign them to the freezer …
Vitetta licensed production of ricin vaccine to DOR BioPharma, now Soligenix. Readers know that in over a decade Soligenix hasn’t brought a single thing to market. And now the company is virtually in the toilet.
Live by the fad funding and hype that runs the bioterror defense industry, die by it.
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02.02.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 2:44 pm by George Smith
Soligenix, a small company from the old Alliance for Biosecurity, recently acquired about six hundred thousand dollars from a New Jersey government state tax division function. Essentially, it looks like an accounting trick installed by the state to keep poorly-performing companies alive for a little while.
In the last ten years Soligenix hasn’t brought anything to market. And its main claim to funding has been for development of a ricin vaccine, called RiVax.
There is no demand or need for a ricin vaccine except perhaps among other researchers who work with pure ricin.
More recently it has also hitched its dray to anthrax vaccine manufacturing — another area of endeavor where the taxpayer is a guaranteed buyer.
From a press release:
Soligenix has received $574,000 in funding in a non-dilutive financing through the State of New Jersey’s technology business tax certificate transfer program, the company said Thursday …
The funds boost the company’s cash position to $6.2 million, or $0.028 per share, with no debt or preferred stock outstanding.
Soligenix expects the cash to last until the third-quarter of 2013, it said …
The technology business tax certificate transfer program allows approved and unprofitable biotech companies to sell their unused net operating loss carryovers (NOLs) in addition to unused research and development tax credits for at least 80 percent of the value of the tax benefits to “unaffiliated” profitable corporate taxpayers in the State of New Jersey … This allows biotech businesses to turn their tax losses and credits into cash proceeds to fund additional research and development, buy equipment or facilities, or cover other allowable expenses …
In September the company’s stock went virtually to zero (from a high that wasn’t so great) when one of its other products called orBec, failed in clinical trials.
Trading below a nickel, right axis.
More recently the company performed what appears to be another accounting trick in order to boost stock price.
From the Times of Trenton newspaper:
Local pharmaceutical developer Soligenix sought yesterday to shore up its stock price by doing a 1 for 20 reverse split, effectively converting 20 shares into 1, ending at yesterday’s market close with a price of less than a dollar.
The company’s shares have been in a long, slow decline.
This is not precisely true. Soligenix’s stock price went from being worth very little to worth almost nothing overnight, according to the graph.
Soligenix was formerly known as DOR Biopharma. The name change never helped.
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02.01.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 1:38 pm by George Smith
Today I point you to an article in the Western Farm Press on the attempted revival of the castor industry in the US. Castor oil has value in industry but in the Seventies it died here for reasons having to do with price. It was produced much more cheaply overseas and today India owns most of the business.
Castor mills existed in the US and the plant was cultivated in Texas and other places. No significant hazard was associated with its growth and use.
Since castor was cultivated and milled, trucks carrying castor seed and the mash of them traveled the roads of the land.
From this blog, in 2008:
[Castor seed oilcake] and seeds containing ricin would have had to travel the roads of the country. If one searches further, reference to it can be found in municipal codes for the transporting of “hazardous materials” via trucking. Castor seed oilcake [was] a material that [did] not require a 24-hour emergency phone hotline listed on the shipping manifest. In the Texas city of Laredo’s municipal code, the materials, referred to as “castor bean,” “castor meal,” “castor flake,” and “castor pomace” are things deemed of the same hazard, or lack of it, as “dry ice,” “fish meal,” “fish scrap,” “battery powered equipment,” “battery powered vehicle,” “electric wheelchair” and “refrigerating machine.”
The war on terror changed everything. Good science, common sense and a regard for the value in history were tossed out for the equivalent of old wive’s tales, a belief in rubbish minted by the US extremist right in the Eighties, and very bad counter-terror forecasting.
Castor seeds, because they contain about five percent protein — most of which is assumed to be ricin — were deemed easy to make into a weapon of mass destruction. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
However, it became the received wisdom. It hasn’t mattered that no terrorists have ever successfully used ricin. And it has not mattered that there has only been one instance, ever, (one I’m not going to mention because it’s cited ad nauseam, anyway) of the use of ricin in a state-instigated assassination.
So any attempt to revive castor cultivation in the US immediately runs up against belief from the war on terror and the homeland security apparatus.
An article published today, by BusinessWeek, entitled “Biological Attack Threat Cited as Pentagon Bolsters Defenses,” illustrates the problem.
First, the article is based on no actual evidence other than the now bog standard claims about what is easy for terrorists and supposition.
And it furnishes another piece of received wisdom, repeated thousands of times since 9/11, even though it’s not actually true:
“I would put ricin at the top of the list??? of threats, Kelsey Gregg of the [Federation of American Scientists] said. “You can get a deadly amount of it pretty easily.???
What you can get is an amount of castor powder, or the grind of castor seeds. And it contains some ricin but not quite enough to make a weapon of mass destruction although it has occasionally been used in domestic poisoning attempts — one, I believe — in the last decade. It’s put into food in such instances and, even then, often the victim stubbornly refuses to die.
And any larger purchases or attempts to get bagloads of castor seeds in the US are now monitored to a certain extent.
In any case, no terrorists have ever produced purified ricin. None. It hasn’t been done.
And that’s because it isn’t the elementary procedure lay people, and this includes most counter-terror experts in the employ of the US government, believe it to be.
The idea that ricin was easy to make comes solely from the extremist survivalist right in the United States. This group had authors with names like Kurt Saxon and Maxwell Hutchkinson, individuals who put their notional ricin recipes, sloppy inexact procedures for simply grinding and degreasing castor seeds, into pamphlets and books published by the fringe press in this country.
But after 9/11, the US national security apparatus, along with the mainstream media, worked the angle that al Qaeda could whip up anything dangerous with very little effort.
And one component of the hysteria always contained assertions that chemical and biological weapons were easy to make from recipes available from the Internet in seconds.
These recipes were all descendants of the trash printed by the US neo-Nazi/survivalist right. However, that material had gone around the world and been translated in documents subsequently found in hideouts in Kabul and Kandahar after the US overthrow of the Taliban.
But I’ve wandered far from my promise to point to the article on tentative steps toward a renewal of castor agriculture in the US, published in the Western Farm Press.
A few excerpts from it should serve to illustrate the problems:
In a time when bio-security and foreign oil dependency share the spotlight as major issues facing the nation, it comes as no surprise that the idea of growing castor on U.S. soil and extracting castor oil for biofuels and industrial use is a growing controversy with supporters on both sides of the question: Would the benefits outweigh the risks?
On one hand there is little or no commercial castor production in the U.S. Nearly all castor oil used in the U.S. is imported from India, China and Brazil. But because of its high seed oil content, castor has tremendous potential as an oilseed crop in North America, especially in parts of the Southwest. The increasing demand and potential use of castor oil in the production of specialty chemicals, biodiesel, and RFS2 renewable fuel has generated considerable interest by several companies in developing commercial castor oil production in this country. Since castor grows well on marginal land, it represents an alternative crop suitable for production in select areas of Texas.
On the other hand, castor production comes with a reputation, largely related to the fear of growing a potentially toxic crop. Ricin, a protein toxin found only in the endosperm of castor seed, can represent up to 5 percent of the meal weight remaining after oil extraction. It could pose a threat if not carefully isolated and controlled as there is a concern the meal could be refined and used as a bioterrorism agent.
“With castor seed producing as much as 50 percent oil and its ability to grow productively on marginal land, it represents a crop that could address a growing demand for castor oil. India virtually controls the global market now, and there is potential for domestic production,??? reports Dr. Calvin Trostle, associate professor and research scientist at Texas A&M AgriLife in Lubbock.
“Castor production will play a major role for many years to come,??? agrees Dr. Dick Auld, oilseed crop specialist and research scientist at Texas Tech University. “At one time some 70,000 acres in Texas were dedicated to castor farming. But when prices fell in the 1970s interest faded, and concerns over ricin and the potential for contamination of food crops overshadowed interest for its return.???
Castor/ricin contamination of food crops is not something that seems to concern that part of the world that still uses it for bulk oil and fertilizer production. India, China and Brazil simply do not care what beliefs the United States has twisted itself into accepting because of the war on terror.
Yet, the agricultural scientists working on the worthy idea to bring this industry back must act like ricin toxicity is a substantial obstacle. For practical purposes it is but this is far more due to the nature of the time we live in than any real need to come up with new methods and plans for growing and milling castor plants.
It wasn’t this way in the past. It isn’t anywhere else, either. And in the city of Laredo they once did not worry much about a spilled truck load of castor mash or castor seeds.
Clean it up, sweep it to the side of the road, let the sun and weather take care of it, whatever. But it in no way merits fear like a potential weapon of mass destruction.
“[Calvin Trostle] adds that researchers are recommending stringent management and control measures, such as dedicating combines to castor-only applications, taking safeguard in transportation and storage of castor seed to eliminate contamination and restrictions on growing food crops on fields used for castor,” reads the Western Farm Press near the end.
“Extraction And Characterization Of Castor Seed Oil” is the title of a paper published by researchers at Rufus Giwa Polytechnic, a college in Nigeria.
In the United States this procedure, which here is presented for the isolation and analysis of the chemical properties of castor oil, would be considered a ricin recipe because it also yields de-greased castor mash.
Indeed, the crime one is convicted of when caught pounding castor seeds in the US is that of taking a significant step toward the making of a chemical or biological weapon. And everyone who has been brought up on such a charge, or a related one in the last decade, has been sent over.
“The castor meal or cake is mainly used as fertilizer, this is because it is unsuitable as an animal feed because of the presence of toxic protein called ricin and toxic allergen often referred to as CBA (castor bean allergen),” write the Rufus Giwa authors. “However, it is noteworthy that none of the toxic components is carried into the oil.”
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01.30.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 1:44 pm by George Smith
From the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, a laboratory designed to fight bioterror has no bioterror to fight.
Because the only bioterror was American bioterror defense industry bioterror. In the entire decade.
So there’s make work setting up test exercises for things which, in all likelihood will never happen. And moving into police work, which in the case mentioned by the newspaper, means helping to chase around those people selling and smoking the new kind of synthetic pot called bath salts.
Anyway you look at it, it’s trivial applications for trivial problems deceptively advertised as things bigger and more meaningful.
Please don’t take the bioterror funding away! See, it’s good for something! Like protecting the populace from synthetic Demi Moore dope and the odd intestinal illness that shows up every couple of years.
In the meantime, nationwide austerity forces the lay-offs of something one does need everyday — teachers.
From the Los Angeles Times:
When Jeffery H. Moran goes to work each day, he swipes his security badge, passes into an airtight chamber, opens a bombproof door and enters a lab full of deadly toxins.
As chief of the counter-terrorism laboratory at the Arkansas Department of Health — one of 62 such federally funded labs in the country — he heads two dozen chemists who are on constant alert for the release of pestilence or poisons in the United States.
Armed with $2 million worth of new equipment, Moran concocts gruesome tests to keep his team sharp. He has laced samples of baby formula with lethal ricin. Poured rat poison into water bottles. Tainted blood with cyanide gas …
Using a counter-terrorism lab to test for synthetic marijuana is the latest sign of how a multibillion-dollar national infrastructure built to detect or respond to chemical or biological attacks over the last decade has adapted to the lack of any actual attacks.
Stewart Baker, former head of policy at the Department of Homeland Security, said he wasn’t surprised that Little Rock’s high-tech lab is helping police ferret out potheads.
“Otherwise they would be like the Maytag repairman, just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring,” Baker said.
The only place ricin has ever been put in food, excluding one case in which a husband tried to kill his wife and failed, in the last decade is in government labs. And the only place pure ricin exists is also in government labs, or private sector research labs funded by the taxpayer.
No terrorist has ever produced pure ricin.
And no terrorists have successfully used cyanide gas bombs.
Edward Hammond is the only critic polled by the Times. For those of us who have followed the issues over a decade, Hammond was known for the Sunshine Project, a watchdog agency for bioterror research, one that worked quite well.
“Pork, pork, pork, pork, pork,” Hammond told the Los Angeles newspaper. “These state departments of health have become addicted to extra federal bioterrorism dollars.”
And Hammond is on the money.
About a week ago a newspaper in the Pacific northwest ran a news brief on a local laboratory that had taken bioterrorism funds to finance testing of oysters for marine vibrios.
Outside the Gulf coast states, the only marine vibrio that causes foodborne illness is known as Vibrio parahaemolyticus.
The Los Angeles Times newspaper mentions the lab in part of its piece:
In California, the Humboldt County Public Health laboratory spent federal bioterrorism funds to buy a DNA-sequencing machine. The lab began using the device this month to test for bacteria in oysters harvested off the state’s coastline.
“We don’t just purchase the equipment and it sits in the corner,” said Jeremy Corrigan, who manages the lab and is state bioterrorism coordinator for Northern California. “I use it for dual purposes.”
The initial story on the lab, which ran in the Times-Standard of Eureka, CA, informed:
Humboldt’s vibrant oyster farming industry and bioterrorism funds have allowed the county’s public health laboratory to deploy a cutting-edge process to test for shellfish contamination.
The laboratory is now the only public facility in California to utilize a molecular process — known as polymerase chain reaction — for oyster testing. The only other laboratory to perform this type of work is a private lab in San Diego …
According to public health, two cases of the intestinal infection caused by virbrio parahaemolyticus were reported in 2007, but it is unclear if they were linked to oyster consumption. No cases have been reported in the past four years.
Dale said the company has done quality control for oysters and water as a precaution. About 70 percent of California’s oysters are grown in Humboldt Bay.
Although there has never been a positive result, a recent false positive illustrates the streamlined convenience of the new process, he said.
The LA Times piece did not mention how minor the nature of the threat was. And it is baffling that the only result, one false positive, could be peddled as something which is actually fulfilling a need.
“Last year, people who smoked Spice or other fake pot variations made 6,955 calls to poison control centers across the country, more than twice the number of calls in 2010,” wrote the Times reporter, in trying to make the case that identifying bath salts synthetic dope is more than a trivial business.
Some statistics from the Bulletin of Cannabis Reform:
Number of estimated marijuana users, nationally, 2007: 25.2 million
Number of estimated marijuana users, California, 2007: 3.3 million
Number of arrests for marijuana use, California, 2007: 74,024
Percentage expression of poison calls on bath salts usage relative to total number of marijuana users in US: 0.000275992063
“What are you people? On dope?” — Mr. Hand, Fast Times at Ridgemont High
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01.19.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle at 3:40 pm by George Smith
Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer winner for news articles on an Ebola virus outbreak, did a question and answer with herself concerning the scientific publication (or censorship) of experimental genetic alteration to bird flu virus, on a a New York Times blog recently
It’s here.
It spawns a ridiculous quote, a cliched and shopworn idea that’s long been passed off as gospel by those pushing fear of imminent, or easily done, bioterrorism:
A biological weapon can be made in a high school biology lab …
It’s a brief trash emission by someone who established a reputation writing material that was distinctly not trash.
In 1995 I bought a copy of Garrett’s The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.
It’s a detailed scholarly book, fascinating to laymen and specialists alike.
However, a Pulitzer is a journalism prize. It is not at all the same thing as a Nobel. It is not an indication of excellence in lab research. And a Pulitzer is not a magic ticket that substitutes for getting the full union card in hard science.
Garrett’s Wiki bio reads, in part:
Garrett graduated with honors in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She attended graduate school in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at University of California, Berkeley and did research at Stanford University … During her PhD studies, Garrett started reporting on science news for radio station KPFA. The hobby soon became far more interesting than graduate school and she took a leave of absence to explore journalism. Garrett never completed her PhD.
Maybe Laurie Garrett knows first-hand about the ease, or lack of it, of working with human pathogens. And maybe not. I don’t know.
My perspective has always been very different. Microbial and biochemical preparations, which are what biological weapons are, never seemed high-school lab easy to me. (And if you have ever seen new students, in high school or college, struggle with introductory methods …)
Garrett works out of the Council on Foreign Relations, which like many high-button think tanks, isn’t nearly what it used to be, rep wise. The age of Internet and abuse of argument from authority have taken a toll on all such institutions.
And she recently joined the list of obscure and slightly-famous anthrax deniers, those publicly asserting they believe Bruce Ivins could not possibly have done the crime.
In December of 2001 Garrett wrote a long piece on bioterrorism, potential catastrophe and national unpreparedness for Vanity Fair.
At the time, no one knew the mailed anthrax had come out of Fort Detrick.
And no one knew that the only other case of war-on-terror era biological badness with select agents, the unrestricted sale of pure botulinum toxin to anyone who wanted it, would soon start up, sold out of private sector lab in the SF Bay area, one supplying reagents to those researching bioterrorism as a consequence of the anthrax mailings.
Neither of these places were high school labs. And since then there has been no bioterrorism generated by rogue science from such humble environs.
Interestingly, Garrett mentions another earlier example of bioterrorism research in which censorship came up during the war on terror.
She writes:
[In July 2005], The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper by Lawrence Wein, of Stanford, and Yifan Liu, of Harvard, that amounted to a recipe for concocting botulism-laced milk. Bruce Alberts, who was then the editor of the journal, resisted suggestions that he censor the paper, writing in an accompanying editorial that “protecting ourselves optimally against terrorist acts will require that both national and state governments, as well as the public, be cognizant of the real dangers.
At the time, the PNAS paper received a great deal of publicity. And it was spun off into a sensational guest editorial in the New York Times, one which was rebutted by Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland, and myself.
We argued that the claims made about botulinum toxin in the Proceedings paper, which was a statistical analysis and not based on any wet work anyway, were not a roadmap to terrorism. With respect to that, it didn’t matter if the paper was published.
However, often we’re seen to live in a fiendishly curious and complicated world.
The authors of the botox bioterror paper had cited the laboratory in the Bay Area that was selling the deadly poison to anyone who called for it. Those sales would eventually result in criminal prosecutions, convictions and people on slabs, kept alive by ventilators, after they were overdosed by botox produced in a US research lab.
However, the scientists publishing through Proceedings, it seemed, did not know this at the time. Instead, in the same paper, they suggested that one of the laboratory’s other research formulations could be useful in securing against the potential threat of large-scale botox poisoning.
The authors had further posited terrorists might buy a biological weapon from a “black market” lab or make it from some document downloaded from the Internet. In real life in 2005 there were no such black market labs and the document was not useful. However, there was a US free market-based fully licensed and very sophisticated biochemical fine products lab selling it to greedy people.
Again, to reiterate, the anthrax and botox did not come from high school biology labs.
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01.16.12
Posted in Bioterrorism at 11:10 am by George Smith
An Ohio State University study estimates the cost of foodborne illness in the US at $77 billion/year. The study also breaks out which microorganisms cost the most and which are the most expensive per person.
At the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy:
Although the estimated annual toll of foodborne illnesses and deaths in the United States was revised sharply downward by federal officials in 2010, foodborne disease still costs the nation up to $77.7 billion a year, according to a new study in the Journal of Food Protection.
The study, by Robert L. Scharff of Ohio State University, is based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) December 2010 estimate that the nation has 48 million cases of foodborne illness with 3,000 deaths annually.
According to the [new] model, the most expensive foodborne diseases are associated with Salmonella, at $11.39 billion per year …
On a per-case basis, the most costly foodborne disease by far is Vibrio vulnificus infection, at $2.79 million, according to the enhanced model. Other highly expensive ones are Clostridium botulinum (botulism), $1.68 million, and L monocytogenes, $1.28 million …
Vibrio vulnficus, with which I am personally familiar, is costly because it is catastrophic. It takes an extraordinary effort to save people, if they can be, when a systemic infection takes hold. When people aren’t killed by it, or just acquire it fishing or in shellfish handling, they are maimed in some ugly way, left with disease-caused injury that must be coped with forever.
This unsettling page, calling the disease Marsh Death, makes the case for me.
And why can Vibrio vulnificus cause such horrid injuries?
Because it produces enzymes which degrade the body’s connective tissue, chief among them a collagenase — which catalyzes the dissolution of collagen.
And discovering that was my contribution to science and medicine/health.
The paper describing it was brief but elegant, something of which I am still proud.
Note the citation index for it here.
The paper is free on the web, courtesy of PubMed Central, and easily readable to laymen.
“Collagenolytic activity of Vibrio vulnificus: potential contribution to its invasiveness.” Nice title, if I do say so myself. Perfectly descriptive.
However, American science can be very shortsighted. In 1982 there was virtually no interest in Vibrio vulnificus even though now it has a much higher profile in the nation’s consciousness.
Vibrio vulnificus is why there is currently government regulation and continuing work on “post-harvesting processing” and sanitizing raw oysters.
When I left Lehigh University there was no opportunity to work on further characterization of the microbe’s protein chemistry anywhere.
There was no funding for it. And so I wound up doing someone else’s uninteresting basic vanity science, at — paradoxically — Penn State’s medical school in Hershey, PA.
After that, I’d had enough of lab research.
Here is a pdf of statistics compiled from the national Vibrio surveillance program, first instituted in 1988, six years after I published on V. vulnificus. It notes vulnificus causes the majority of Vibrio illnesses reported in the southern states covered by the program.
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01.03.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 1:26 pm by George Smith
Since the war on terror the samizdat literature of America’s neo-Nazi/survivalist extreme right has meant collateral damage in surprising places.
From just before the holidays, an old tale from Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook (printed by the defunct American publisher of notoriously repugnant crap, Loompanics) built around a bit of fact about rosary peas, inconvenienced a tourist attraction in Cornwall, England, called the Eden Project. Bad publicity and embarrassment was the immediate symptom, as it always is with anything even remotely connected to America’s special brand of paranoid underground literature on how to strike your enemies down and overthrow the government.
From the Daily Mail newspaper:
An alert has gone out for the recall of thousands of beaded bracelets sold in tourist attractions after it emerged they are made from a highly toxic seed.
The Eden Project in Cornwall, which sold 2,800 in a year, is one of 36 retailers urging customers to return the red and black wrist charms.
They are made from the Jequirity bean – a deadly seed of the plant abrus precatorious which contains the toxin abrin, a controlled substance under the Terrorism Act.
Rosary peas have been around forever. And despite fear in the US and UK security apparati, they have inconveniently declined to kill anyone in the last decade. Even though they are routinely sold on eBay.
However, because of The Poisoner’s Handbook, rosary peas — and the small amount of abrin inside their very hard shell, have been treated like castor seeds.
In other words: Ahhhhh, danger!
The Daily Mail reported that the Eden Project had been selling the wristlets made of jequirity beans for a year. With no known intoxications.
Now, if readers turn to page 8 in The Poisoner’s Handbook:
The phytotoxin from precatory beans, also known as jequirity beans, is very similar to ricin and and the extraction process listed … may be used for both …
Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads …
If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can be easily modified to kill.
Obtain, if possible, some acupuncture needles or grind down regular needles as thin as possible while still being strong enough to puncture the jequirity bean coating. Wearing leather gloves, very carefully about a dozen minute holes in each bean on a rosary. When you are finished, spray the string of beads with DMSO … which will dissolve and carry the abrin, and allow to dry.
As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin; the worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse, etc.
These items make wonderful presents for the more religious target.
We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.
Marvelous stuff, that.
Keep in mind that the only stupid people here are those who believe anything in Hutchkinson’s book, having secured it or copies of its ‘information’ for edification and/or training. And over the years there have been hundreds, even tens of thousands of such people, many — surprisingly — in government and national security work.
As with ricin, which is listed next in this thin volume, one sees the obsession — carried into the neo-Nazi/survivalist far right — with the idiotic idea that dimethyl sulfoxide can make ricin, and by extension — abrin from rosary peas, into a contact poison.
Which is rubbish.
Hutchkinson’s book was turned into digital copy and distributed in anarchy files on underground bulletin board systems in the US. They were part of what was considered a forbidden lore. In that world, having access to it meant you were special and clever, when — in reality — just the opposite, you were a fucked-up anti-social dullard, was a more accurate assessment.
Later, these files were migrated to the Internet.
In this way Hutchkinson’s poison book, torn into fragments, traveled around the world. Eventually, its poison recipes also found their way into al Qaeda/jihadi documents, just in time for the War on Terror.
If you’re found with recipes from the book in the US, along with a few castor seeds or, perhaps, the makings of a silencer or pipe bomb, they’re part of the evidence that will send you to the pen.
In England, jihadi documents containing items bowdlerized from Hutchkinson’s notes are treated as things deemed likely to be of use in terrorism. As such, they’re considered seditious and, again, if you’re caught in the wrong circumstances or religion, enough to have you imprisoned.
“In Trinidad in the West Indies the brightly coloured seeds are strung into bracelets and worn around the wrist or ankle to ward off jumbies or evil spirits,” reads the Daily Mail newspaper.
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11.01.11
Posted in Bioterrorism, Decline and Fall, Extremism, Permanent Fail at 7:34 am by George Smith
Today’s top news item, a whoopie cushion expose in which the lousiest national leadership in national history, the GWB administration, believed it was exposed to botulinum toxin.
Why is it so bad? Well, our leaders — so benighted and fixated on the war on terror — were obviously too stupid to pick up the phone and get someone who would have told them right away that a detection was a false positive with absolute certainty.
Why with absolute certainty?
First — because bioterrorism detectors really don’t work very well. And they didn’t work at all reliably when this actually happened.
Second — there was no intelligence or evidence anywhere in the world that indicated al Qaeda or anyone, besides the United States biodefense industry, could make botulinum toxin into the potential weapon which the alleged attack would have represented. (In fact, there was only one company that leaked botulinum toxin during the height of the war on terror and it was here and on the inside of the homeland security industry. But the details aren’t important to get into for this post.)
The story reveals the absolute meretriciousness of so much American threat assessment. Identification of threats, not by way of any evidence, but by errant and lousy technology and potentials dreamed up by “advisors” and “experts” on what they think WE could do with all our resources.
From the wire:
It was just a few weeks after September 11, 2001 when Condoleezza Rice accompanied the president on a trip to China for the APEC summit. In Shanghai Vice President Cheney appeared on a secure video conference line and delivered President George W. Bush this message:
“The Vice President came on the screen and said that the White House detectors have detected botulinum toxin, and we were all– those of who exposed were going to die,??? Rice told me.
He said that?
“Yes, he said that. And I remember everybody just sort of freezing, and the President saying, ‘What was that? What was that, Dick?’??? Rice, who was the National Security Advisor at the time, said.
Botulinum toxin is, according to the Center for Biosecurity, the “most poisonous substance known??? and “extremely potent and lethal.???
The exposure time meant that she and those on the trip — Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Chief of Staff Andy Card — were all at risk, Rice told me.
The next day, the poisoning was confirmed as a false alarm by whatever great national lab had been employed to find out. No test mice breathing cups of White House air had died.
Folks, this is nothing but pure proof of epic fail in leadership, a tale of our self-absorbed leaders who believed in nothing but their own idiotic ghost stories and the machine that supported them in that.
These were the kind of people you’d laugh at on the SyFy Channel if they were the poorly dressed moron freak show reality actors on Ghost Hunters, stumbling through old houses with their Radio Shack cameras and night vision goggles, wondering if the cold draft just felt or creak heard from a dark corner was evidence of something from beyond.
What’s the big difference between the Ghost Hunters crew and our old national leaders? Not a trick question. Answer: The Ghost Hunters didn’t have the power to wreck the country.
This story, if you’re asking, is apparently courtesy of Condoleeza Rice’s new book, something called “No Higher Honor.” No higher joke.
If you had a class at Stanford with this person you’d be moved to throw things.
Another sad part is that most journalists simply don’t know enough about such details from the war on terror to get they’ve been fed still another worthless but demoralizing turd wrapped in the shiny paper of a new book announcement.
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10.18.11
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 9:28 am by George Smith
Today, a press release, one of a steady stream from the homeland security industry.
This one on a DHS contract for ricin detection to small business that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for taxpayer money.
Keep in mind the only market for ricin detection is the artificial one created by the rise of powder hoaxing as hobby for the disgruntled white survivalist nut or felon in the United States. And, primarily, that owes much of its existence due to the explosive growth of the homeland security complex, one which has spent the last ten years loudly telling everyone that ricin is easy to make.
The press release, from PositiveID Corporation:
PositiveID Corporation (“PositiveID” or “Company”) PSID
+32.14% , a developer of medical technologies for
diabetes management, clinical diagnostics and bio-threat detection, announced that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) Science and Technologies (“S&T”) division has directed and funded the development of the Company’s immunodetection assay for the identification of Ricin toxin to meet the specific needs that DHS has in securing the nation against biological threats. Ricin, a chemical warfare agent, is derived from the seeds of the castor oil plant Ricinus communis and has become a tool of terrorist groups across the world due to its effortless production and high toxicity.
Straight off there’s a good bit of lying. In ten years, ricin has not been much of a tool for terrorists. Only 22 castor seeds were found in the infamous Wood Green case in 2003.Castor powder cake was found in Iraq, ground after we invaded the country. And — of course — more recently, the rubbish story about potential ricin bombs being made somewhere in the wastes of Yemen.
Over the last decade the overwhelming majority of incidences of ricin in the news come from stories about powder hoaxes or cases where white American loners (and the occasional British neo-Nazi) have decided to grind castor seeds into a mush.
These are the facts. Amply documented in the Ricin Kooks tab at right, over many years.
Consider this: The country can lay off public sector workers en masse — 250,000 teachers. But no expenses have ever been spared for research and development of detection for a “threat” that has killed absolutely no one in the last ten years.
One can now think of this as something of a Ponzi scheme, entitlement spending, or a small but still significant Keynsian jobs program akin to paying people to dig holes and fill them back in the next day. For years.
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