Noted: Other supposedly secure laboratories are conducting research on even more frightening pathogens that, unlike anthrax, might spread easily and quickly through the air from human to human. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, recently reported that they had produced a new avian influenza virus with some characteristics of the 1918 influenza virus that killed tens of millions of people around the world. They did this work in a laboratory with the same safety rating as the bioterror lab at the C.D.C. A small careless error in these experiments could be devastating.
Office of Strategic Communication