Uganda Bioterrrorism Target Eyeball

By Josh Tron, NYT

The laboratories of Uganda's Ministry of Agriculture, Animals, Industry and Fisheries sit on the top of a quiet hill on a turnoff near the airport, behind an eroded fence. At the end of a hallway is a room with an unlocked refrigerator.

That is where the anthrax is kept.

Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, and a delegation of Pentagon officials visited the laboratories on Wednesday for the first stop on a three-country tour of East Africa to assess the next generation of American security concerns.

The team also visited the Uganda Virus Research Institute, where the Ebola and Marburg viruses are taken to study and kept in a spare room in a regular refrigerator near the bottom of the compound. Warning signs say "restricted access," but the doctors there say that hardly means the area is secure.

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 lines of the struggle to counter terrorist threats around the world.

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

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 American security interests.

In 2004, Congress expanded the mandate of the Nunn-Lugar program, which originally focused on dismantling warheads in former Soviet states, to include geographic regions like this one. Now, Mr. Lugar's trip will take the delegation to Uganda, Burundi and then Kenya.

Uganda, a longtime military ally of the United States, 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 hippopotamuses 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 "Hot Zone" and "Outbreak" novels that have dramatized the dangers of viral outbreaks. But the underlying threat, American officials contend, is that lax security at the poorly financed labs that collect and study these diseases pose a bioterrorism risk.

Ugandan officials also say the country's push to create new federal districts, part of what the government calls an effort to decentralize the country, has spread the bureaucracy so thin that disease samples can take weeks to make it to a laboratory, or never arrive at all.

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