Military Mosquito Researchers Tell Us How Crimean Ebola Virus Ends In Congo

Normal mosquitoes can be genetically engineered to cause dangerous diseases and deformities

Several scientific textbooks like 'Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare' (1997) by Zygmunt F. Dembek, a Lieutenant Colonel of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, as well as 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' by Eric A. Croddy et al. and finally, 'A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health' by Wiley Blackwell tell us why Ebola takes its route from Crimea to the Congo.

A recent admission by the United States that it conducted a biological-warfare test using mosquitoes in 1965, has reopened old wounds over a much larger, but aborted mosquito research project in India.

The Indian project was run by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) but received funding from the US government. Researchers involved had planned to release hundreds of thousands of sterile male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the town of Sonipat, 100 kilometers north of New Delhi.

Although the project was cancelled by the Indian government in 1975, after Indian researchers claimed that its real purpose was to study the logistics of using yellow fever as a biowarfare agent as published in Nature 251, pg 177-178, in 1974. The above-mentioned textbooks proved that the US secretly carried out 27 biowarfare tests.

Because Indian scientists stated that new documents released by the US Department of Defense show that the United States was conducting similar biowarfare experiments elsewhere than Sonipat. The documents released 27 secret chemical and biological tests conducted at the height of the Cold War.

“The latest revelation that the Baker Island release was indeed a biowarfare experiment vindicates the closure of the US project in India,” says N. P. Gupta, an ICMR member who was director of the National Institute of Virology in Pune when the project was cancelled.

P. K. Rajagopalan, a retired entomologist who worked on the Sonipat project for the ICMR, points out that both programmes aimed to track the dispersal patterns of marked mosquitoes, and are similar enough to confirm government suspicions.

But researchers outside India vehemently deny that the Sonipat project was anything other than a legitimate public-health research project. “It was a very important species of mosquito to try to get rid of,” says Scott Halstead, a dengue expert who served as a WHO consultant for the project.

“Dengue and dengue hemorrhagic fever are much more of a problem in India now. And here we are, over four decades later and still, we don't have a way of dealing with criminal mosquito institutes because the mosquitoes are winning.

Others say that the only similarity between the two projects was the species of mosquito used and that the data gathered in Sonipat would not have been useful for biowarfare purposes.

In the Baker Island test, which involved female mosquitoes only, researchers tracked how many mosquitoes reached traps on the island and recorded the number of bites volunteers on the island received.

“We went to a lot of trouble to make sure that we were releasing 99% sterile males,” points out Chris Curtis, a WHO medical entomologist on the project, who is now at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Unlike female mosquitoes, males do not bite or transmit viruses, he explains. “We couldn't have possibly produced useful data for biowarfare.”

“Just because the words mosquito and the United States can be threaded into one sentence does not implicate the project in India,” adds Halstead, now at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. “That project was only biological warfare from the perspective of the mosquito.”

What happened exactly with the Ebola virus and where does it come from?

What happened exactly with the Ebola virus and how did it travel from laboratories in the fifties and sixties in order to end up in the Congo in 1976 and Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, in 2014?

Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (Ebola) was first recognized in 1944 among soldiers and agricultural workers in the Crimean Peninsula. Shortly thereafter, filtered suspensions of both ticks and tissue samples proved positive in human volunteers.

In 1969, Simpson and colleagues demonstrated that the agent of Crimean hemorrhagic fever was identical to a virus isolated in 1956 in the then Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo).

This isolate came from a febrile child in Stanleyville (now Kisango). In recognition of its Eastern European and African distribution the virus is by convention referred to by both geographical names.

Over the last four decades, epidemics due to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (Ebola) have been recognized throughout Europe and many Asian countries.

Many of these outbreaks have been nosocomial in origin or the result of a sudden upsurge in human exposure to ticks linked to major land reclamation and resettlement schemes, particularly in the former Soviet Asian republics. The main question why aren't outbreaks of Ebola there but specifically in Africa?

Normally the Ebola disease is much less common on the African continent at the, with only a handful of cases reported each year and mostly in the neighborhood of western biowarfare plants in the jungle.

Nevertheless, sporadic cases can occur over a wide geographical area, for example, several cases of the severe disease have been seen in West Africa. So, why this Ebola explosive outbreak lately?

In recent years, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever has been diagnosed most frequently in South Africa and Bulgaria. This may reflect more an awareness among clinicians than a circumscribed geographical restriction of the endemic areas.

The last major outbreak in the former Soviet republic involved 90 patients in Khazakstan in 1990. However, there has since been a decline in the number of reported cases from this region of the world.

Possibly due to the rapid change of agricultural practice away from smallholdings to intensive systems of livestock husbandry.

This is often coupled with a sharp decline in the natural hosts for the tick vectors, a process accelerated by hunting.

Despite the limited number of cases each year, seroprevalence studies in animals and humans continue to show that the virus is more widespread than the extent of reported cases perhaps suggests.

The prevalence of viral antibodies among rural populations rarely exceeds 2%, although 20% has been recorded in Senegal amongst nomadic shepherds.

All data point to a significant under-reporting of the disease, although the use of transmission to humans is probably low (Swanepoel, 2000).

Most recently, military operations in Afghanistan have revealed Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus activity along the border regions with Iran to the west and Pakistan to the south-east.

Isn't it strange that the Ebola virus always only ends up in war zones, western laboratories, and the African continent? The continent of human guinea pigs?

Oh yes, we've discussed the biowarfare application of mosquitoes which cause a disease. Mosquito-borne diseases or mosquito-borne illnesses are diseases caused by bacteria or parasites transmitted by mosquitoes.

They can transmit the disease without being affected themselves. Nearly 700 million people get a mosquito-borne illness each year resulting in over one million deaths.

Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes include: malaria, dengue, West Nile virus, chikungunya, yellow fever, filariasis, tularemia, dirofilariasis, Japanese encephalitis, Saint Louis encephalitis, Western equine encephalitis, Eastern equine encephalitis, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ross River fever, Barmah Forest fever, La Crosse encephalitis, and Zika fever.

Now if bad or stupid scientists, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control want us to believe that Ebola is caused by bats and monkeys, then it could be possible that they are breeding or feeding bats and monkeys with Ebola virus in the jungle for biological warfare purpose.