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SALT LAKE CITY - Biological weapons testing at a
U.S. Army depot will be postponed until a Salt Lake City hospital
staff is trained to handle a possible accident, the Army announced.
Tests were scheduled to begin Monday at Dugway Proving Grounds, said
Col. Frank Cox, commanding officer at Dugway.
The tests were postponed because a piece of equipment malfunctioned,
Cox said Friday. He also acknowledged that the Army had not lived up
to its agreement with University Hospital to train its personnel in
case of an accident. The Army, he said, "has some egg on our face."
"We should have conducted the training and we didn't," he said. Dr.
Zell McKee, a specialist in infectious disease at the University of
Utah School of Medicine, said the Army has yet to provide the hospital
with antidotes to toxins it plans to use in the development of
defensive biological weapons.
The hospital contracted in January 1990 to treat possible victims of
biological and chemical operations.
Tests were scheduled to begin Monday at the desert depot 70 miles
southwest of Salt Lake City of a "relatively harmless" strain of a
pathogen called Versinia pestis, Cox said.
McKee, a longtime opponent of biological weapons development and
testing, scoffed at the Army's characterization of the organism as
harmless.
Though the United States has accepted a 1972 treaty banning the use
and possession of biological agents and toxins, the Army uses the
840,000-acre depot to test defenses against chemical and biological
warfare.
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