Biological Incident

UN Security Council Meeting Thursday 15th October 2015

On Tuesday 29th of September 2015, 1,430 refugees from Nigeria arrived in the Minawao refugee camp in
northern Cameroon, the average monthly figure is usually around 500 people. Suspecting the cause of this
influx was a massive Boko Haram terrorist attack, who have become bolder since allying themselves with so
called Islamic State, the aid workers took in and began processing the refugees. Four days past without
further arrivals or incident, however on Sunday a woman aged 23 was discovered dead in the small
Cameroonian refugee village of Ngam. The doctors at the camp, fearing a possible Ebola case, carried out a
post-mortem exam on the body, but the results were inconclusive and no further action was taken. By the
following Wednesday, four of the five doctors and scientists involved in the case were dead, whilst the fifth
patient was suffering from severe hemoptysis, breathing problems and was running a dangerously high fever.
Being an American citizen, he was hastily flown back to the United States and taken to the University of
Maryland Medical Center, a Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) authorised hospital.
Immediate tests were carried out in an attempt to discover what was responsible for this deadly outbreak,
however it wasnt until Friday 9th October before the cause was found.
Dr Carla Alexander, an assistant professor of medicine specialising in human virology, discovered that the
cause of the patients illness, and the deaths of the others, was Yersinia Pestis or more specifically a strain of
pneumonic plague. Whilst there are outbreaks of the plague reported throughout the world every year, for
example in 2013 783 cases were reported, of which 123 died, this current outbreak had just reached a death
rate of 100%. On top of this, further cases were being reported throughout Ngam, in several other refugee
villages, and in various hospitals in Northern Nigeria who were beginning to report the same strange
symptoms developing in hundreds of patients. In less than two weeks, this disease had reached epidemic
proportions.
The following day CDC director Tom Frieden flew to Maryland to be briefed on the current situation, there
he was informed that this strain of plague had been deliberately genetically engineered, in an advanced
laboratory, to be extremely virulent and resistant to all widely available antibiotics, and a chief CDC scientist
commented that this strain was the most dangerous mutation I have ever seen and that only a few
countries have the ability to create such a weapon. Armed with this knowledge the director swiftly informed
both the president and joint chiefs of this development, consequently both the United States and Nigeria
have called for an unprecedented United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss this growing situation.
The latest estimates for this council dating to the 14th of October have confirmed that more than 8,000
people are dead, with countless thousands more infected. Any attempts to keep this outbreak under a media
blackout and shifting the cause to Ebola have proven ineffective, as the direct consequence of new cases
being confirmed in Guangzhou, China and Madrid, Spain, the media are beginning to break the story.
US intelligence officials, for the benefit of this council only, have shown to us a short clip released by Boko
Haram last night, in which it depicts several of their fighters, all wearing masks, inside what appears to be an
advanced high tech laboratory, with one fighter holding a sign which in Arabic translates as It has begun.
The goals of this UN Security Council meeting are as follows:
To determine how to combat the spread and severity of this outbreak;
To determine whether this is a biological terrorist attack against civilians, and how to respond;
To determine which country operated this biological weapons factory inside Nigerian territory, with
the aims of both punishing them, and finding a potential cure.

University of East Anglia

Model United Nations Society