Depopulation of a Planet
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Part II: What You Can't See Will Hurt You!
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IN SIX PARTS
Part II: What you can’t see will hurt you!
Depopulation Of A Planet
If You Thought It Was Bad…
It's Worse Than You Think!
Part II: What You Can't See Will Hurt You!
11/22/95 RICK MARTIN
Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., in a chapter titled Human Survival: A Psycho-Evolutionary Analysis appearing in the book, Human Survival & Consciousness Evolution, writes “The great experiment in consciousness, human evolution, now stands at a precipice of its own making. The same consciousness which struggled for millions of years to ensure human survival is now on the verge of depleting its planet’s resources, rendering its environment uninhabitable, and fashioning the instruments of its own self-annihilation. Can this consciousness (we) develop the wisdom not to do these things? Can we foster sufficient self-understanding to reduce our destructiveness, and mature rapidly enough to carry us through this evolutionary crisis? These are surely the most crucial questions of our time, or of any time. Today we face a global threat of malnutrition, overpopulation, lack of resources, pollution, a disturbed ecology, and nuclear weapons.· At the present time, from fifteen to twenty million of us die each year of malnutrition and related causes; another six hundred million are chronically hungry and billions live in poverty without adequate shelter, education, or medical care (Brandt, 1980; Presidential Commission on World Hunger, 1979). The situation is exacerbated by an exploding population that adds another billion people every thirteen years, depletes natural resources at an ever-accelerating rate, affects "virtually every aspect of the Earth's ecosystem (including) perhaps the most serious environmental development ·.. an accelerating deterioration and loss of the resources essential for agriculture" (Council on Environmental Quality, 1979). Desertification, pollution, acid rain, and greenhouse warming are among the more obvious effects.
Overshadowing all this hangs the nuclear threat, the equivalent of some twenty billion tons of TNT (enough to fill a freight train four million miles long), controlled by hair-trigger warning systems, and creating highly radioactive wastes for which no permanent storage sites exist, consuming over $660 billion each year in military expenditure, and threatening global suicide (Schell, 1982; Sivard, 1983; Walsh, 1984). By way of comparison, the total amount of TNT dropped in World War II was only three million tons (less than a single large nuclear warhead). The Presidential Commission on World Hunger (1979) estimated that $6 billion per year, or some four days' worth of military expenditures. could eradicate world starvation. While not denying the role of political, economic, and military forces in our society, the crucial fact about these global crises is that all of them have psychological origins. Our own behavior has created these threats, and, thus, psychological approaches may be essential to understanding and reversing them. And to the extent that these threats are determined by psychological forces within us and between us, they are actually symptoms - symptoms for our individual and collective state of mind. These global symptoms reflect and express the faulty beliefs and perceptions, fears and fantasies, defenses and denials, that shape and mis-shape our individual and collective behavior. The state of the world reflects our state of mind; our collective crises mirror our collective consciousness.”
In the book entitled Population - Opposing Viewpoints is a chapter written by Jacques-Yves Cousteau which first appeared in the Nov. 1992 edition of Populi. In this article, Cousteau writes, [quoting:]
MALTHUS'S PREDICTION
HAS COME TRUE
“What is happening now is a consequence of the exponential nature of population growth while available resources obey a linear progression and are ultimately limited, as the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus prophesied almost 200 years ago. The warnings were repeated by the Club of Rome after World War II, and substantiated by Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution; in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, addressed to the leaders of the world, he insisted that they had only 30 years to harness the demographic threat.
“Twenty years have passed since, Borlaug told me, and not only have the leaders taken no action whatsoever, they have even avoided discussing the subject. Since then, the situation has worsened.”
Again, Cousteau, [quoting:]
SOLUTIONS MUST BE FOUND TO CURB POPULATION GROWTH
If we want our precarious endeavor to succeed, we must convince all human beings to participate in our adventure, and we must urgently find solutions to curb the population explosion that has a direct influence on the impoverishment of the less-favoured communities. Otherwise, generalized resentment will beget hatred, and the ugliest genocide imaginable, involving billions of people, will become unavoidable.
We must have the courage to face the situation: either the leaders of the world, having participated in thc Rio Conference, understand that what is at stake is literally to save the human species, and accept the need to take drastic, unconventional, unpopular decisions, or the impending disaster dreaded by the British and American scientific academies will precipitate”
Cousteau concludes with: "Uncontrolled population growth and poverty must not be fought from inside, from Europe, from North America or any nation or group of nations; it must be attacked from the outside - by international agencies helped in the formidable job by competent and totally independent non-governmental organizations.
"A world policy inspired by eco-biology and eco-sociology is the only one capable of steering our perilous course towards a golden age, and protecting cultural and biological diversity while proudly hoisting the colors of humankind."
CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
In the 1982 book, Higher Form Of Killing - The Secret Story Of Chemical And Biological Warfare [Hill and Wang Publishers, 19 Union Square West, New York 10003 - to order, call 800-788-6262], which is a research masterpiece. Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman write,
“In no future war will the military be able to ignore poison gas. It is a higher form of killing. [Professor Fritz Haber, pioneer of gas warfare, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1919.]
“Thc world's oldest chemical warfare installation occupies 7,000 gently rolling acres of countryside on the southern edge of Salisbury Plain, known as Porton Down [England]. Over 700 men and women work there in labs and offices scattered through 200 buildings. There are police and fire stations, a hospital, a library, a branch of Lloyds Bank, a detailed archive with thousands of reports and photographs; there is even a cinema to screen the miles of film taken during experiments. They are the residue of more than six decades of research, generally at the forefront of contemporary scientific knowledge. Though there have been many political storms, and several attempts to close it down, Porton has survived them all - proof of the military's enduring fascination with poison gases, even in a country which now officially has no chemical weapons.
“It was in January 1916 that the War Office compulsorily purchased an initial 3,000 acres of downland between the tiny villages of Porton and Idmiston, and began to clear a site for what was then known as the War Department Experimental Ground.”
Later in the chapter,
“This was a crucial admission. No matter how loudly the British, or any other nation, renounced gas warfare in public, in secret they felt bound to give their scientists a free hand to go on devising the deadliest weapons they could, on the grounds that they had first to be invented, before counter-measures could be prepared.
“Porton Down made use of this logic between 1919 and 1939 to carry out a mass of offensive research, developing gas grenades and hand contamination bombs; a toxic air smoke bomb charged with a new arsenic code-named "DM" was tested; anti-tank weapons were produced; and Porton developed an aircraft spray tank capable of dispersing mustard gas from a height of 15,000 feet. At the same time the weapons of the First World War - the Livens projector, the mortar, the chemical shell and even the cylinder - were all modified and improved.”
Several paragraphs later, “Mustard gas, 'the King of Gases', employed the most human volunteers. Just one experiment in 1924 involved forty men.”
And,
In October 1929, "two subjects received copious applications of crude Mustard which practically covered the inner aspect of the forearm. After wiping the liquid mustard off roughly with a small tuft of grass the ointment (seven weeks old) was lightly rubbed with the fingers over the area ..."
This is just a random selection of the sort of work which was done in Britain. Similar research was being carried out throughout the world. Italy established a Servizio Chemico Militate in 1923 with an extensive proving ground in the north of the country. The main French chemical warfare installation was the Atelier de Pyrotechnic du Bouchet near Paris. The Japanese Navy began work on chemical weapons in 1923, and the Army followed suit in 1925. In Germany, despite the fact that Haber's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had been closed down in 1919, limited defensive work continued, later to form the basis of Germany's offensive effort. And in 1924, the Military-Chemical Administration of the Red Army was established and Russian chemical troops were stationed at each provincial army headquarters.
Chemical weapons were not merely researched and developed - they were used. At the beginning of 1919 the British employed the "M" device (which produced clouds of arsenic smoke) at Archangel when they intervened in the Russian Civil War, dropping the canisters from aeroplanes into the dense forests. The anti-Bolshevik White Army was equipped with British gas shells, and the Red army was also alleged to have used chemicals.
Later in 1919, Foulkes was dispatched to India, and in August urged the War Office to use chemicals against the Afghans and rebellious tribesmen on the North-West Frontier: "Ignorance, lack of instruction and discipline and the absence of protection on the part of Afghans and tribesmen will undoubtedly enhance the casualty producing value of mustard gas in frontier fighting."
[Again, later in the chapter:]
“Finally, in May 1925, under the auspices of the League of Nations, a conference on the international arms trade was convened in Geneva. Led by the United States, the delegates agreed to try and tackle the problem of poison gas, "with", as the Americans put it, "the hope of reducing the barbarity of modern warfare." After a month of wrangling in legal and military committees - during which the Polish delegation farsightedly suggested that they also ban the use of germ weapons, then little more than a theory - the delegates came together on 17 June to sign what remains to this day the strongest legal constraint on chemical and biological warfare:
The undersigned Plenipotentiaries, in the name of their respective Governments:
Whereas the use of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world; and
Whereas the prohibition of such use has been declared in Treaties to which the majority of Powers of the world are Parties; and
To the end that this prohibition shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and practice of nations;
Declare: That the High Contracting Parties, so far as they are not already Parties to Treaties prohibiting such use, accept this prohibition, agree to extend this prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to thc terms of this declaration...”
Thirty-eight powers signed the Geneva Protocol, among them the United States, the British Empire, Prance, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada; the fledgling USSR did not attend.
"The signing of the Geneva Protocol of 1925" as one expert has put it, "was the high-water mark of thc hostility of public opinion towards chemical warfare." Unfortunately, the anti-gas lobby had underestimated the strength of the interests ranged against them. Merely signing the Protocol was not enough to make it binding - individual governments had to ratify it. In many cases this meant a time lag of at least a year, and it was in this period that the supporters of chemical weapons struck back.
The United States Chemical Warfare Service [CWS] launched a highly effective lobby. They enlisted the support of veterans' associations and of the American Chemical Society (whose Executive declared that "the prohibition of chemical warfare meant the abandonment of humane methods for the old horrors of battle"). As has often happened since, the fight for chemical weapons was represented as a fight for general military preparedness. Senators joined the CWS campaign, among them the Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs who opened his attack on ratification in the Senate debate with a reference to the 1922 Washington Treaty: "I think it is fair to say that in 1922 there was much of hysteria and much of misinformation concerning chemical warfare." Other Senators rose to speak approvingly of resolutions which they had received attacking the Geneva Protocol - from the Association of Military Surgeons, the American Legion, thc Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, the Reserve Officers Association of the United States and the Military Order of the World War. Under such heavy fire, the State Department saw no alternative but to withdraw the Protocol, and reintroduce it at a more favorable moment. It was not to be until 1970, forty-five years after the Geneva conference, that the Protocol was again submitted to the Senate for ratification; it took another five years for this to be achieved.
Japan followed America's example and refused to ratify (they finally did so in May 1970). In Europe, the various countries eyed one another cautiously. France ratified first, in 1926. Two years later. in 1928, Italy followed suit and a fortnight after her, the Soviet Union declared that she, too, considered herself bound by the Protocol. Only after Germany ratified in 1929 did Britain feel able at last to accept the Protocol: on 9 April 1930, five years after the Conference, Britain at last fell into line.
Many of the states which ratified the Protocol - including France, Great Britain and the USSR - did so only after adding two significant reservations: (1) that the agreement would not be considered binding unless the country they were fighting had also ratified the Protocol; (2) that if any other country attacked them using chemical or biological weapons, they reserved the right to reply in kind.
[Later in the chapter:]
This "defensive" work included "improvements to many First World War weapons, including gas shells, mortar bombs, the Livens Projector and toxic smoke generators" and the development of "apparatus for mustard gas spray from aircraft, bombs of many types, airburst mustard gas shells, gas grenades and weapons for attacking tanks." The various inventions were tested in north Wales, Scotland, and in installations scattered throughout the Empire, notably northern India, Australia and the Middle East.
The commitment by most of the world's governments never to initiate the use of poison gas did not stop research: it simply made the whole subject that much more sensitive, and thus more secret. In 1928, the Germans began to collaborate with the Russians in a series of top secret tests called "Project Tomka" at a site in the Soviet Union about twenty kilometers west of Volsk. For the next five years, around thirty German experts lived and worked alongside "a rather larger number of Soviet staff," mainly engaged in testing mustard gas. The security measures surrounding Project Tomka "were such that any of its participants who spoke about it to outsiders risked capital punishment."
In Japan, experimental production of mustard gas was begun in 1928 at the Tandanoumi Arsenal. Six years later the Japanese were manufacturing a ton of Lewisite a week; by 1937 output had risen to two tons per day. Extensive testing - including trials in tropical conditions on Formosa in 1930 - resulted in the development of a fearsome array of gas weapons: rockets able to deliver ten liters of agent up to two miles; devices for emitting a "gas fog"; flame throwers modified to hurl jets of hydrogen cyanide; mustard spray bombs which released streams of gas while gently floating to Earth attached to parachutes; remotely-controlled contamination trailers capable of laying mustard in strips seven meters wide; and the "Masuka Dan", a hand-carried anti-tank weapon loaded with a kilogram of hydrogen cyanide.”
And then, "There is now little doubt that from 1937 onwards the Japanese made extensive use of poison gas in their war against the Chinese. In October 1937 China made a formal protest to the League of Nations." And, two paragraphs later,
"The Italians made use of chemicals in their invasion of Abyssinia in much the same way. In 1935 and 1936, 700 tons of gas were shipped out, most of it for use by the Italian air force. First came torpedo-shaped mustard bombs."
In a later chapter from A Higher Form Of Killing, comes:
“The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eight Arrondissement, the explosion of anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932).
The history of chemical and biological warfare has thrown up some strange stories, but few are as bizarre as those which surround a small island off the northwest coast of Scotland. It lies in its own well-protected hay, close to the fishing village of Aultbea - an outcrop of rock, well-covered with heather, three hundred feet high, one and a half miles long and a mile wide.
“It takes about twenty minutes to reach by fishing boat from Aultbea. As you draw closer it's possible to make out the shapes of hundreds of sea birds nesting on its craggy shore-line. Their calls are the only sounds which break the silence. Once upon a time the island is said to have supported eleven families. Today, the only sign of human habitation is the ruin of a crofter's cottage.
“This utterly abandoned island is Gruinard. Thanks to a series of secret wartime experiments - the full details of which are still classified - no one is allowed to live, or even land here.”
Again, later in the chapter, “Anthrax had long been considered the most practicable filling for a biological weapon. A decade earlier, Aldous Huxley had predicted a war involving anthrax bombs. Even before that, in 1925, Winston Churchill wrote of 'pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast...' Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies only but whole districts - such are the lines alone which military science is remorselessly advancing."
From the same chapter,
“In July 1942 the Chinese allegations were passed on to Winston Churchill. Two days later he had them placed on the agenda of the Pacific War Council.
“The growing alarm in London and Washington that the Japanese were on the verge of initiating biological warfare gave an added urgency to the 'first anthrax bomb tests on Gruinard that summer. Up to then the Allied germ warfare effort had lagged significantly behind the Japanese, but from 1942 onwards the Anglo-American biological programme began to vie with the Manhattan Project for top development priority.
The British biological warfare project was born on 12 February 1934 at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff. For two years, a Disarmament Conference in Geneva had been discussing means of finally ridding the world of chemical weapons. Germ warfare had also been included, and in view of this, Sir Maurice Hankey told the Service Chiefs, he "was wondering whether it might not be right to consider the possibilities and potentialities of this form of war."
[End quoting.]
From the same chapter, "In October the CID approved, and Hankey became Chairman of the newly-created Microbiological Warfare Committee.
"In March 1937 the Committee submitted its first report, specifically on plague, anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease. Though they concluded that 'for the time being...the practical difficulties of introducing bacteria into this country on a large scale were such as to render an attempt unlikely' they urged that stocks of serum be built up to meet any potential threat. From 1937 to 1940, Britain began to stockpile vaccines, fungicides and insecticides against biological attack.
"In April 1938 the Committee produced a second report, and in June Hanley circulated 'Proposals for an Emergency Bacteriological Service to operate in War': the emphasis was on defence, the tone still low-key."
Winston Churchill in a "Most Secret" minute to the Chiefs of Staff. 6 July 1944:
"... It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred percent. In the meanwhile, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by the particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there."
Again from A Higher Form Of Killing, "At the end of the war, the British alone had manufactured 70 million gas masks, 40 million tins of anti-gas ointment and stockpiled 40,000 tons of bleach for decontamination; 10 million leaflets had been prepared for immediate distribution in the event of a chemical attack, and by a long-standing arrangement the BBC would have interrupted programmes with specially prepared gas warnings. Contingency planning ran down to the smallest details."
Later in the same chapter, “On Christmas Eye 1949, Moscow Radio announced that twelve Japanese prisoners of war were to be charged with waging biological warfare in China. The Russians claimed that the Japanese had been producing vast quantities of bacteria, and had planned to wage biological warfare against the Allies. The allegations became more specific the next week. Three days later Moscow Radio claimed that Detachment 731 of the Kwantung Army had used prisoners of war for horrific biological warfare experiments, and then, the following day, that one of the prisoners had confessed to his interrogators that the unit had been established on the orders of the Emperor himself. On 29 December Pravda came to the point. The United States was protecting other Japanese war criminals, and engaging in biological warfare research herself."
Later still,
“In the early days after the Second World War it was extremely difficult for the British or Americans to check many of the astonishing claims they came upon in the captured German flies. They concluded, however, that there was more than adequate evidence that the Soviet Union had been, and was still, engaged in some form of biological warfare research. Although little was known of the nature of contemporary work, it was thought that the Russians maintained some six sites for biological warfare research, most of them in the Urals.
The British and Americans recognized that their intelligence was inadequate. But the evidence was judged more than sufficient to justify continuing similar work in the west. When they came to assess the vulnerability of the United Kingdom to a potential germ attack they discovered that London, containing over 12 percent of the population, was only 500 miles from airbases in Soviet-occupied eastern Germany. When the Joint Technical Warfare committee assessed how easy a retaliatory strike with biological weapons might be, they realized that the civilian targets against which bacterial devices would be most effective were dispersed across the huge expanse of the Soviet Union. Even using British Empire airbases in Nicosia (Cyprus) and Peshawar (India), there was only one Soviet city of more than 100,000 population within 500 miles range, and only thirty-five such centers of population within 1,000 miles range. Clearly, at the very least, there should be a major research programme aimed at developing some defense. Intelligence, it was freely admitted, was inadequate. But no such reticence found its ways into the stories which began appearing in the press, [a headline:]
RUSSIA REPORTED PRODUCING 'DISEASE AGENTS' FOR WAR
In eight "military bacterial stations", one of them on a ghost ship in the Arctic Ocean, the Soviet Union is mass-producing enormous quantities of "disease agents" for aggressive use against the soldiers and civilians of the free world. In particular, the Red Army is stockpiling two specific "biological weapons", with which it expects to strike a strategic blow and win any future war decisively, even before it gets started officially. [End quoting.]
Jumping several paragraphs later, "There seems little doubt that the Soviet Union did conduct extensive research into germ warfare in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was felt legitimate to conclude that such research was unlikely to have stopped at some arbitrary point after the Second World War. But firm intelligence to suggest the nature of the work was notably lacking.
"For most of the post-war years military microbiologists developed 'retaliatory' germ weapons against threats they did not know to exist, and then attempted to develop defenses not against the weapons era potential future enemy, but against the diseases they themselves had refined."
Again, later, [quoting:]
Certainly during the 1950s, the Russians were expecting chemical and biological weapons to be used against them by the West. In 1956 Marshall Zhukov told the Twentieth Party Congress; "Future war, if they unleash it, will be characterized by the massive use of air-forces, various rocket weapons, and various means of mass destruction, such as atomic, thermonuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons." Zhukov did not say that the Soviet Union planned to use these weapons herself. By 1960 the head of US Army Research was telling a Congressional inquiry: "We know that the Soviets are putting a high priority on the development of lethal and non-lethal weapons, and that this weapons stockpile consists of about one-sixth chemical munitions." If it was true that one sixth of the total amount of weapons available to the Soviet Union was made up of chemical shells and bombs, it represented an alarming threat to the United States and her NATO allies. Some years after this estimate had concluded that the United States was "highly vulnerable" to germ warfare attack. They pointed out that since the end of the war very little new work had been done to produce a biological bomb. It would, they believed, take "approximately one year of intensive effort" before America could wage biological warfare. True, there was no hard evidence that any potential enemy had developed a biological weapon, but could the United States afford to take the risk of not having her own, should one later be developed elsewhere?
The argument was persuasive. In October 1950 the Secretary for Defense accepted a proposal to build a factory to manufacture disease. Congress secretly voted ninety million dollars, to be spent renovating a Second World War Arsenal near the small cotton town of Pine Bluff, in the mid-west state of Arkansas. The new biological warfare plant had ten stories, three of them built underground. It was equipped with ten fermentors for the mass production of bacteria at short notice, although the plant was never used to capacity. Local people in the town of Pine Bluff had some idea of the purpose of the new army factory being built down the road, but in general there was, as the Pentagon put it later "a reluctance to publicize the program."
The first biological weapons were ready the following year, although they were designed to attack not humans but plants. In 1950 Camp Detrick [Maryland] scientists had submitted a Top Secret report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on work they had carried out on a “pigeon bomb”. In an attempt to discover a technique of destroying an enemy's food supplies, the scientists had dusted the feathers of homing pigeons with cereal rust spores, a disease which attacks crops. The researchers discovered that even after a one hundred mile flight, enough spores remained on the birds' feathers to infect oats left in their cages. Then they had experimented in dropping pigeons out of aircraft over the Virgin Islands. Finally, they dispensed with live birds altogether and simply filled a "cluster bomb" with contaminated turkey feathers. In each of these bizarre tests the men from Camp Derrick concluded that enough of the disease survived the journey to infect the target crop. In 1951 the first anti-crop bombs were placed in production for the US Air Force.
The United States had established the first peace-time biological weapon production line.
[And later:]
Fort Detrick scientists discovered a Trinidadian who had been infected with yellow fever in 1954 and had later recovered. They took serum from the Trinidadian and injected it into monkeys. From the monkeys they removed infected plasma, into which they dropped mosquito larvae. The infected mosquitoes were then encouraged to bite laboratory mice and pass on the disease. This ingenious technique of public health research in reverse worked. The mice duly contracted yellow fever.
Laboratories were built at Fort Detrick where colonies of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were fed on a diet of syrup and blood. They laid their eggs on moist paper towels. The eggs would later turn into larvae, and eventually into a new generation of mosquitoes. The Fort Detrick laboratories could produce half a million mosquitoes a month, and by the late fifties a plan had been drawn up for a plant to produce one hundred and thirty million mosquitoes a month. Once the mosquitoes had been infected with yellow fever, the Chemical Corps planned to fire them at an enemy from "cluster bombs" dropped from aircraft and from the warhead of the "Sergeant" missile.
To test the feasibility of this extraordinary weapon, the army needed to know whether the mosquitoes could be relied upon to bite people. During 1956 they carried out a series of tests in which uninfected female mosquitoes were released first into a residential area of Savannah, Georgia, and then dropped from an aircraft over a Florida bombing range. "Within a day", according to a secret Chemical Corps report, "the mosquitoes had spread a distance of between one and two miles, and bitten many people". The effects of releasing infected mosquitoes can only be guessed at. Yellow fever, as the Chemical Corps noted, is "a highly dangerous disease", at the very least causing high temperatures, headache, and vomiting. In about a third of the recorded cases at that time, yellow fever had proved fatal.
Nor were mosquitoes the only insects conscripted into the service of the army. In 1956 the army began investigating the feasibility of breeding fifty million fleas a week, presumably to spread plague. By the end of the fifties the Fort Detrick laboratories were said to contain mosquitoes infected with yellow fever, malaria and dengue (an acute viral disease also known as Breakbone Fever for which there is no cure); fleas infected with plague; ticks contaminated with tularemia; and flies infected with cholera, anthrax and dysentery. [End quoting.]