2y ago

Officials bust illegal lab containing 20 infectious agents, hundreds of lab mice

arstechnica.com

U.S. News @beehaw.org

farcaster @beehaw.org

2y ago

Officials bust illegal lab containing 20 infectious agents, hundreds of lab mice

arstechnica.com /health/2023/07/illegal-lab-with-infectious-diseases-and-dead-mice-busted-in-california/

39 comments

More than 175 [lab mice] were found dead, and the city took possession of the remaining animals in April and euthanized 773.
I hope the checked in with the CDC before they did that. Nothing of concern was found this time, but taking lab mice from an illegal biochemical situation could be dangerous.
- I'm totally sure you thought of something that groups of professionals didn't.
  
  Have you seen the shit municipal governments do? They aren't known for basic competence
  
  Idk I am worried about the phrasing “the city took possession.” Most cities don’t have their own dangerous lab bio cleanup experts.
  Edit: I bothered to click and it was the county health dept that took samples and stuff, glad it wasn’t the sheriff lol
  
  Individuals think. Groups do not.
  
  Aw cute, you still believe that the system works.
  
  This but unironically
  
  Do you think the group that found this were professionals at infectious disease control? My fear was a county inspector took the animals without realizing the severity of the situation.
- What's the worst that could happen? The spread of some horrible zoonotic disease that brings that world to its knees? That hardly seems likely.
  
  Chance in a million.
So I did a bit of digging, and it's unlikely this is a foreign agent.
It looks like Prestige Biotech was a creditor for and acquired the assets of Universal Meditech when the company collapsed. Prestige was storing what was left of Universal in this warehouse.
Universal Meditech was selling SARS test kits that got recalled in February of last year, which likely led to their bankruptcy. My guess is that Prestige didn't have the available funding to properly dispose of the biohazards or care for the test subjects, ended up with a bunch of infectious mice that they couldn't get rid of legally, and just decided to warehouse them in Fresno until they came up with a solution.
Edit: corrected per @fne8wah's note
- Thanks for catching that - updated.
Doesn't sound like Xiuquin Yao and his crew were doing anything shady at all, I'm sure their unlicensed warehouse bioweapons lab was perfectly safe.
- It always comes down to the government working against the small family-owned businesses.
Extraordinary. 🤨 This is the sort of news I browse the internet for. Wonder what all that's about, then ...
- …
  This poster used a true ellipsis instead of three dots! I commend you! You rock twenty kinds of awesome.
This is insane. Straight out of a spy novel. Foreign power maintaining bioweapons facility in the US.
- Makes me wonder how many others there are that don't have an illegal hose attached to the outside.
  There should be random unannounced business inspections. Even when shit isn't as shady as this, when I worked in an ice cream factory, they knew when health inspections were coming and went into high cleaning mode immediately before. While I don't think they would have failed if they didn't do that, it's not very useful to do inspections only after a business does a deep clean, so there's no way to know.
  So random inspections that aren't announced until the inspector is at the gate, plus offer nice rewards for people reporting a PA announcement to do some quick cleaning (or say the company has to hand over video footage for the hour before up to the hour after).
- In your extensive experience, how common are unlicensed biotech R&D facilities being run in secret? And I see no reason being capable of biotech R&D would preclude it from being capable of more malicious purposes. If anything, I'd assume a significant amount of overlap between the two capabilities.

39 comments