Re: Virologist who was fired from research laboratory in Canada over security threat resurfaces in China
Dear Editor
Developing agents for Biological Warfare is the one military area where medical collaboration is essential for success.[1] The idea of using communicable diseases to slaughter an enemy is an old one, and anecdotal accounts survive (like the covert application of smallpox by the British at Fort Pitt, against Native Americans). But to achieve effective weapons needs professional understanding of pathogens, their transmission and their control. The archetypal "professional" was Surgeon General Shiro Ishii (1892-1959). The atrocities he committed for the Imperial Japanese Army were mainly in China - today he would probably be better known in the English-speaking world, if his 1945 project to spread plague fleas along California had been completed. I do not know what Military Medical Science [1] Xiangguo Qiu is doing now at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but I wonder if it is conducted with the transparency and ethical scrutiny one associates with her past work, for the Public Health Agency of Canada.
[1] Dyer, O. Virologist who was fired from research laboratory in Canada over security threat resurfaces in China. BMJ 2024;384:q743
Competing interests:
Member of the special interest group for Ethics in the Faculty of Public Health.
27 March 2024
Woody Caan
Retired professor of public health
RSPH FPH FAcSS
Duxford (a frequent visitor to the Imperial War Museum)
Rapid Response:
Re: Virologist who was fired from research laboratory in Canada over security threat resurfaces in China
Dear Editor
Developing agents for Biological Warfare is the one military area where medical collaboration is essential for success.[1] The idea of using communicable diseases to slaughter an enemy is an old one, and anecdotal accounts survive (like the covert application of smallpox by the British at Fort Pitt, against Native Americans). But to achieve effective weapons needs professional understanding of pathogens, their transmission and their control. The archetypal "professional" was Surgeon General Shiro Ishii (1892-1959). The atrocities he committed for the Imperial Japanese Army were mainly in China - today he would probably be better known in the English-speaking world, if his 1945 project to spread plague fleas along California had been completed. I do not know what Military Medical Science [1] Xiangguo Qiu is doing now at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but I wonder if it is conducted with the transparency and ethical scrutiny one associates with her past work, for the Public Health Agency of Canada.
[1] Dyer, O. Virologist who was fired from research laboratory in Canada over security threat resurfaces in China. BMJ 2024;384:q743
Competing interests: Member of the special interest group for Ethics in the Faculty of Public Health.