Word: usamriid
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Dates: during 2002-2002
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Nobody just waltzes into the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The lab, better known as USAMRIID, sits on the grounds of Fort Detrick, in rural Maryland, about an hour north of Washington, and before you can even get close to the mostly windowless concrete building, you have to get on the base itself. Employees must flash their badges, and visitors must show two forms of photo ID--and open their trunks and glove compartments--before guards will let them pass. To enter the lab itself, armed security guards, present around the clock, must wave you through...
...such scrutiny? Because USAMRIID handles the deadliest pathogens known to man, including Ebola, Marburg virus, Rift Valley fever--and, of course, anthrax. It was at Fort Detrick that the U.S. stockpile of biological weapons was manufactured in the 1960s, and at USAMRIID that research into deadly germs was concentrated for the next three decades...
...nation's recovery from the anthrax attacks--a doubling of the reward for information to $2.5 million; news that scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland were close to making a genetic fingerprint of the anthrax powder; the reopening of the freshly decontaminated Hart Senate Office Building--USAMRIID itself was under attack. The Army was scrambling last week to answer charges that controls inside the lab over the past decade were at best lax and at worst scandalous. The reports added support to a growing suspicion that whoever sent the anthrax letters may have had strong ties...