Ugandan virus labs could arm terrorists

THE laboratories of Uganda's ministry of agriculture, animals, industry and fisheries sit on top of a quiet hill at a turn-off near the airport, behind an eroded fence. At the end of a hallway is a room with an unlocked fridge. That is where the anthrax spores are kept.

In the Uganda Virus Research Institute, deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses are used for studies and kept in a spare room in a regular fridge near the bottom of the compound. Warning signs say "restricted access," but the doctors there say that hardly means the area is secure.

Visitors earlier this month echoed those concerns as the laboratories here in Entebbe, a warm and sleepy city on the shores of Lake Victoria, are part of what the delegation called the front line of the struggle to counter terrorist threats around the world. Direct bombing attacks and "dirty", nuclear devices notwithstanding, US security is worried biological warfare could become part of the terrorists' armoury.

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Andrew C Weber, assistant to the US secretary of defence for nuclear, chemical and biological defence programmes, said: "We need to tighten the security of vulnerable public health laboratories in East Africa. Preventing terrorist acquisition of dangerous pathogens, the seed material for biological weapons, is a security imperative."

There is just cause for alarm. The rise of the Shabab, the powerful Islamist insurgent group that claimed responsibility for deadly suicide bombings in Uganda as crowds gathered to watch the final match of the World Cup, has refocused attention on East Africa as a frontier in US security interests.

In 2004, Congress expanded the mandate of the Nunn- Lugar programme, which originally focused on dismantling warheads in former Soviet states, to include geographic regions such as this one. Now, a delegation of Pentagon officials headed by Indiana senator Richard G Lugar, have visited the labs for the first stop on a three-country tour of East Africa to assess the next generation of US security concerns. Burundi and Kenya are the next destinations.

Uganda, a long-time military ally of the US, may be the most vivid illustration of the concerns. Warm, wet and on the equator, Uganda is a biological petri dish. Anthrax has killed hundreds of hippos in recent years. In 2008, a Dutch tourist died from Marburg disease after visiting a cave in a national park. In 2007, an Ebola outbreak killed more than 20 people.

This is the stuff of The Hot Zone and Outbreak books that have dramatised the dangers of viral outbreaks. But the underlying threat, US officials contend, is that lax security at the poorly-financed labs that collect and study these diseases pose a bio-terrorism risk.Ugandan officials also say its push to create new federal districts, part of what the government calls an effort to decentralise the country, has spread the bureaucracy so thin that disease samples can take weeks to make it to a lab, or never arrive at all.

"It makes it difficult to report new cases," said Dr Nicholas Kauta, a commissioner at the ministry of agriculture. "We don't know what is around us."

The laboratories at the ministry of agriculture, built in the 1920s, have broken windows, and a chain-link fence surrounding the compound is ripped open. According to the commissioner, there used to be more than 200 technical staff members, but now there are only six. In the anthrax lab, one doctor showed how to use a cellphone camera placed on top of a microscope to study the bacteria, a demonstration of the lack of proper equipment. "These are cries for assistance that the US is eager to provide," Lugar said.

At the Uganda Virus Research Institute, there are state-of-the-art facilities run by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, an American agency, but not at all of it. The deadliest agents, including Ebola, are still kept downstairs in a room intended to handle lesser infectious diseases such as influenza.

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"This is the end-state," said Lieutenant Colonel Jay Hall, from the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, pointing out the disease control agency labs upstairs.

"This is where we want to get all other labs."