Several Pacific countries have already demonstrated their frustration with the US-led biological experiments on their territories. (Representational image: Reuters)

By Anthony Bell

Financial Express

Despite heavy criticism, the United States of America (USA) biological and medical agencies and enterprises continue maintaining experiments and activities that may pose a threat of a biological leak. These activities have a vast geography stretching from Central and Eastern Europe to the Asia-Pacific Region. It is noteworthy that the aforementioned experiments seem to have no stop signs on their roads.

Several Pacific countries have already demonstrated their frustration with the US-led biological experiments on their territories. In December 2022, the members of the Makabayan coalition of the House of Representatives of the Philippines requested the country’s Congress to investigate the biological activities of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) at the Regional Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory (RADDL) in the city of Tarlac. According to the request, the US DoD Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) had apparent and disguised objectives in the Philippines, which could have failed to meet the national interests of Manila. The members of the Parliament of the Philippines demanded that the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Health, and Department of National Defense (DND) thoroughly investigate the activities of the US military in the country. They also called the above-mentioned governmental bodies to issue a full report covering these works, as the citizens of the Philippines had raised some questions considering the fact why the DTRA, not the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), was responsible for civil and agricultural cooperation with the Pacific country.

Previously, Indonesia also declared the US military-led Naval Medical Research Unit Two (NAMRU-2) inexpedient and named its activities useless. The Indonesian authorities called for the cessation of its activities. The US DoD had to bring all its unfinished Indonesian-based projects to the territory of Cambodia.

The countries of Africa also sometimes question the US-led activities at facilities in their territories. The Ministry of Health of a Central African state is now studying the probability of a human-caused outbreak of an Ebola-based virus in September 2022. This concern has been caused by the fact that the Sudan artificially designed germ is fully identical to a virus that was circulating in Africa during the epidemic crisis of 2012.

The US Metabiota company was involved in the relief of the consequences of the Ebola epidemics in Western Africa. The company’s biological safety procedures were previously heavily criticized by the World Health Organization. (WHO). According to a report published by the non-profit Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC), the employees of the Metabiota company did not keep biological safety requirements during the activities to counter the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone in 2015; they also did not report on the involvement of several US DoD experts in the counter-virus procedures. The specialists of the Pentagon were reported to have been dispatching the biological samples of the Ebola virus to the United States.

Along with Asia-Pacific and African countries, the US-driven biological activities are also stretched across the post-Soviet states. Under several programs initiated by the DTRA and other US governmental agencies and private companies, some former members of the Soviet Union host US-funded biological experiments. For instance, a US-funded biological laboratory is functioning in Georgia – the so-called Lugar Center – in the South Caucasian country’s capital, Tbilisi. The facility is functioning under the auspices of the US DoD USAMRU-G and some private companies affiliated with both DoD and DTRA under a state contract. The Level III laboratory is available only to the US citizens with access to classified information who feature diplomatic immunities under the U.S.-Georgian Agreement on Defense Cooperation. The Lugar Center works with a number of biological agents, including anthrax, tularemia and a number of highly contagious hemorrhagic fevers (for instance, the Crimea-Congo disease).

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Via https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-still-maintaining-biological-experimental-facilities-in-asia-pacific-africa-2/3105562/