https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/07/illegal-lab-with-infectious-diseases-and-dead-mice-busted-in-california/
"I’ve never seen anything like this."
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.
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.
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
Risky reply in this case. Took me a second to realize you weren't agreeing with the one you replied to. Guessing that's why you're currently downvoted.
I merely pointed out that some random person in a comment section doesn't outweigh the knowledge of people who do it for a living.
Your comment is just douchey bullshit.
Douchey bullshit because yours has the same tone. I work with various government systems; they're held together by tape and hopes, and I know this because I'm one of the people tasked with using said tape.
There may very well be protocols in place for this kind of thing, but protocols are rarely adhered to very firmly, because everyone believes that someone has a clue of what they're doing.
Both of your comments are tbh. I don't get the sarcasm out of the blue, it just ends up fuelling a nonsense feud.
Why in the fuck would I care what you think? You are just some chucklefuck on the Internet 🤣
doesn’t outweigh the knowledge of people
Rather, you suggested the people were infallible and beyond reproach... Those aren't the same things. Oversights happen. Mistakes are made.
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.
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
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.
I don't see how it's cheaper to maintain an entire facility and staff just to take care of unwanted items, but I concede it's a possibility, bureaucracy and inertia being what it is.
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.