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U.S. Response I: CDC Ships Biological Agents Worldwide The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distributes hundreds of different biological agents to a dozens of countries each year for use in research, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today (see GSN, Sept. 27). The CDC has recently come under criticism for shipments of biological agents to Iraq in the 1980s that some analysts have suspected were used in Baghdad’s biological weapons program. The shipments are part of a worldwide exchange of agents that is necessary in order to conduct research to combat pathogens, CDC officials said. “We ship over 300 agents to several dozen countries every year,” said CDC spokesman Thomas Skinner. “It’s important for the CDC to cooperate with international health authorities on research that ... saves lives. At the same time it’s equally important to us to work with the U.S. Commerce Department to see that these organisms don’t fall into the wrong hands.” Commerce has created a list of countries where biological agents cannot be shipped, including Iran, North Korea and Cuba. In the 1980s, Iraq was not included on that list, but is today, according to the Journal-Constitution. The department also has a list of pathogens that require U.S. approval before export. Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) has called for even stricter controls on the export of biological agents. Byrd has criticized the CDC and the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit firm, for shipping biological samples to Iraq in the 1980s. American Type Culture Collection’s shipments to Iraq are “old news” that came up during congressional hearings in 1993, said company spokeswoman Nancy Wysocki. “The Department of Commerce approved all requests for shipments of biological samples by Iraq,” Wysocki said. The current situation with Iraq, however, has made the dangers of potentially weak export controls on pathogens more apparent, Byrd said. “We not only know that Iraq has biological weapons, we know the type, strain, and the batch number of the germs that may have been used to fashion these weapons,” he said. “We know the dates they were shipped and the addresses to which they were shipped” (Mike Toner, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Oct. 2).
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