The Sunday Times reported this weekend on illicit purchases of endangered monkeys from Tanzania for supposed medical research. The article pointed out Iran’s purchases in particular as a bit unusual:
…scientists at the Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute in Iran had bought 215 vervet monkeys from him this year but he had become suspicious about their true motive, although he was still trading with them. They had “spent a lot of money” on getting the monkeys, even sending over scientists to check on each consignment.
“Iran is very secretive,” said Manji, who has been exporting monkeys for 22 years. “They said it [the monkeys] was for ‘our country’, for vaccine. [They said] ‘We don’t buy vaccine from anywhere; we prepare our own vaccine’.
“But I think they use it for something else. You know why? Because they don’t go on kilos. Iran wants [monkeys weighing] 1.5kg to 2.5kg, [but] 1.5kg for vaccine is not possible.”
What, Iran might be engaged in some sort of potentially offensive biowarfare research? Say it isn’t so! But not so fast…the article goes on to present a possible rebuttal to the statement from the monkey exporter:
It is unclear exactly which type of vaccine the Razi scientists are claiming to be using the vervets for, but the World Health Organisation guidelines on the production of polio vaccine state that vervet monkeys used for testing it should weigh a minimum of 1.5kg. However, the monkeys’ kidney cells can also be used to produce the vaccine, in which case the weight is not relevant.
The story doesn’t provide further insight into Iran’s alleged biowarfare activities. It just generates more questions.
NTI’s page on the Razi Institute
Update: Welcome, Danger Room readers! Here are a few more links ref. Iran’s alleged CBW programs. The thing is, all the unclassified stuff is old, and the sources for it are old. You need to view these things with the understanding that these were the estimates at the time.
Iran’s Continuing Pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction (State Dept., 2004)
Iran’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs (CIA, 2000)
Chemical and Biological Weapons Programs (CNS, 2002)
Filed under: WMD, biological weapons, infectious disease, iran, medicine
Well, the Dutch have figured out how to exact to take care of a piece of the Iran WMD threat. Have you seen this?
http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/agc282/zia/2008/07/netherlands_bans_iranians_from.html
I am very interested in your opinion on this, given your WMD expertise.
Yes I had heard about that. I’ll comment on this over at your blog.
Creepy stuff.
In passing, I would not rely too heavily on the CNS page that you link to. It has not been updated in quite some time. While not wanting to toot my own horn to loudly there was an article on the topic of Iranian CW activity in WMD Insights earlier this year that has a lot of useful links to public US intell assessments of this program.
I agree on that CNS page. I sometimes make such links available for my own reasons…I try to indicate that people should take them with a grain of salt due to their age, or sometimes for other reasons.
I do read WMD Insights and it occurs to me I don’t have it on my links.
I was re-reading Tom Clancy’s Execuitve Orders last month. It was written in 1996, and is set in the aftermath a terrorist attack where a plane is crashed in the U.S. Capitol. Clancy’s vision of a catastrophic terroist attack and the U.S., while not dead-on, does seem prescient when you re-read the book post 9/11. So my eyes opened wide when I read this blurb. A large part of the book focuses on attempts by the Iranian government to cultivate and grow the Ebola Virus for use in a biological attack. The plot involves obtaining several hundred african green monkeys whose kidneys are extracted and liquified to provide a culture for the virus to gorw in. Eerie similarities.
Now don’t go giving Tom Clancy an even bigger head.
Well, I’m no virologist or vaccine scientist, but as I understand it, kidneys from the vervet monkeys in question have been harvested for decades to provide cell cultures for producing vaccines.
In other words, if Iran says the monkeys are for vaccine production, there’s nothing here that proves them wrong. But if any specialists in the subject have a comment on that weight issue, I’m sure we’d all appreciate hearing what you have to say…