MOSCOW, January 30. /TASS/. Chief of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Force Igor Kirillov on Monday said the strategy of military-biological expansion, which is now being implemented in Ukraine, isn’t new, but was established by the US in the 1950s during the Korean conflict.
"I would like to note that the strategy of military-biological expansion is not fundamentally new and was started by the United States during the Korean conflict. Beginning in the 1950s, with the US Navy leading the charge, military biological laboratories have been created in Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia. Their main goal was to collect pathogens of especially dangerous infections and identify the morbidity rate of the local population," he said at a news conference dedicated to an analysis of documents concerning US military-biological activity.
The military official said that in the areas where these laboratories were located, as in the current situation, there was a deterioration in the epidemic situation for especially dangerous infections, and new, non-endemic diseases were recorded in these regions. As an example, he cited the outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Cairo in 1977, where US Navy Military Biological Laboratory No. 3 was stationed. Previously, this disease had been found only to the south of the Sahara. In Egypt, 18,000 people suddenly fell ill at the same time back then.
"Subsequent analysis of samples from the population showed that the total number of people that contracted the disease was about 2 million people. A whole lot of evidence testifies to the artificial nature of this outbreak and the involvement of a US laboratory in it," Kirillov said. He said that a few months before the outbreak of the epidemic, the lab staff had been vaccinated against Rift Valley fever, although outbreaks of that infection had never been recorded in that region, and in the regions of Africa where it’s endemic, it proceeded as a mild influenza-like illness that never ended in fatalities.
Kirillov said during the epidemic in Egypt, the pathogen suddenly acquired a high pathogenicity to humans. "The disease proceeded with bleeding, severe damage to the eyes and nervous system. The virus became highly pathogenic, almost equal in this respect to the viruses of smallpox, Marburg fever and Lassa fever. Such a sudden change in the pathogenicity of the virus is extremely difficult to explain by its natural evolution," he said.