L'Ébola comme arme? L'intérêt de la Russie pour le virus

Des chercheurs russes ont déjà travaillé sur le potentiel du virus comme arme biologique. Le programme secret est interrompu au début des années 1990, mais plusieurs observateurs s'interrogent sur qu'on a fait ensuite des recherches et des agents pathogènes.

 "“The bottom line is, we don’t know what they’re doing with any of the pathogens in their possession,” said Amy Smithson, a biological weapons expert who has traveled to several of the labs and written extensively about the Soviet-era weapons complex.

At least four military labs have remained off-limits to any outside scrutiny since the end of the Cold War, even as civilian-run institutions adopted more transparent policies and permitted collaborations with foreign researchers and investors, U.S. officials and weapons experts say. Even acknowledging — as most experts do — that Russia halted work on offensive bioweapons decades ago, the program’s opacity is a recurring irritant in diplomatic relations and a source of worry for security and health experts who cite risks ranging from unauthorized or rogue experiments to the theft or accidental escape of deadly microbes.

Enhancing the threat is the facilities’ collection of deadly germs, which presumably includes the strains Soviet scientists tried to manipulate to make them hardier, deadlier and more difficult to detect, said Smithson, now a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a research institute based in Monterey, Calif.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ebola-crisis-rekindles-concerns-about-secret-research-in-russian-military-labs/2014/10/23/ce409716-5945-11e4-b812-38518ae74c67_story.html?hpid=z1