Talk:Yellow rain

6500 fatailitys
needs source or deletion Cinnamon colbert (talk) 18:33, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Majority View
How do you suppose what the “majority view” is? You have presented some sources stating that Meselson argument is the majority view, however many sources exist, including several you have used in the article, making the case that the question is still very much open. WVBluefield (talk) 13:49, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * High-quality peer-reviewed review articles are the best sources for dealing with such scientific questions and the pollen explanation is put forward by these sources as the best explanation for yellow rain. The US Army article by Wannemacher and Weiner does put forward a different view, but this is unsurprising considering who they work for! We could certainly expand the summary of the current US government position in the "investigation" section, but we can't give this view too much weight, since the majority of reliable sources take a very different view. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:18, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I've split this section off into a separate paragraph and expanded it using another source. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:55, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I don’t entirely believe that to be the case. There seem to be just as many academic and other high quality sources that leave the debate open. Nearly every RS that sides with the bee poo line relies solely on Meselson and his team’s findings. I would warn that what is and isn’t the best explanation is not up for us to decide. WVBluefield (talk) 19:33, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I've added a set of direct quotes from the most recent reviews from sources such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, Annual Reviews in Microbiology and Annual review of phytopathology, these represent the most authoritative sources possible on a scientific question and they are uniformly negative. I agree entirely that "truth" isn't something that we can decide upon, this is why direct quotes attributed to reliable sources are such major parts of this part of the article - they allow no room for editor interpretation. I might easily have missed some sources however, could you could provide a list of the alternative sources you're referring to so I can look them over? Tim Vickers (talk) 20:07, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll work up a pro/con list and post it within the next few days. WVBluefield (talk) 20:34, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, if you need access to any of the pay-per-view academic literature please e-mail me. Tim Vickers (talk) 20:47, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that would be nice, I'll let you know. WVBluefield (talk) 21:36, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

fabulous article
If I knew how, I would nominate it for FA status. This is a really nice piece of work, and the current authors (27 Oct 2010) can be proud of them selves.Cinnamon colbert (talk) 02:14, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Yellow rains in Sri Lanka
In December 2012 Sri Lankan towns such as Mineragala and Southern provinces experienced Red rain and towns of Polonnaruwa and Kantale experienced Yellow rain. But this yellow rain totally differs from the contents of this article. So natural yellow rain should be also included here. Sri Lanka based researches reveal that this colouration of monsoon rains was due to remains of meteorites. So a section or seperate article must be created.

Source:
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 * Rupavahini broadcasting (government's official broadcasting channel) — Preceding unsigned comment added by G.Kiruthikan (talk • contribs) 06:57, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

POV Issues pervading this article require a rework acknowledging credibility issues with at least one central proponent of the theory that "yellow rain" wasn't biotoxic warfare
Tim Vickers' statement "The US Army article by Wannemacher and Weiner does put forward a different view, but this is unsurprising considering who they work for!" is typical of POV problems with this article.

Not only does this statement betray a very biased and unencyclopedic point of view against the US Army Medical Corps, but it includes the work of Matthew Meselson in the category "High-quality peer-reviewed review articles" despite significant deficiencies in Dr. Meselson's methodology in categorizing the source of the anthrax outbreak at Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg, Russia) while he was also publishing papers and testifying on the nature of the "yellow rain" attacks in Laos.

There was at least one troubling failure by Dr. Meselson in his second paper on the Sverdlovsk outbreak to credit the investigative work of Peter Gumbel, The Wall Street Journal 's Moscow bureau chief, which pointed up a major suppression of reports on anthrax deaths and sickness by the Soviet government among Russian civilians working and living near Biopreparat's secret anthrax weaponization plant in downtown Sverdlovsk. Wittingly or not, Meselson perpetuated this suppression of statistics regarding anthrax deaths and illness in his first paper on the Sverdlovsk outbreak. That paper also repeated an utter fabrication regarding the source of the anthrax as "bad meat from a meat packing plant in Aramil" which Mr. Gumbel was able to show did not exist.

Meselson's failure to mention Mr. Gumbel's work and state its implications for the accuracy of Meselson's first paper on the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak seems to contravene the guidelines of the Vancouver Group on biomedical publication ethics and generally accepted ethical guidelines in scientific journalism. A formal determination by clinical or epidemiological investigators of which guidelines were broken and how seriously they were broken would be welcome, but given Meselson's status as a Lasker Prize winner (the highest award a physician can win short of the Nobel in Medicine) it's very unlikely - the wagons would circle immediately. But Meselson's Lasker Prize was awarded for his contributions to "public policy," which means to save its own reputation from being tarnished, the Lasker Prize committee at least ought to reconsider the largely truth-free nature of Meselson's first paper on the Sverdlovsk anthrax release - which can only be considered an effective use by the KGB of Dr. Meselson as an agent of influence.

Critics of Dr. Meselson's failure to mention Peter Gumbel and The Wall Street Journal's coverage of the Sverdlovsk outbreak and its implications for the accuracy of Dr. Meselson's comments regarding Soviet biological weapons work include acclaimed popular-audience science writer Richard Preston, whose stories on the US and Russian/former Soviet Union's biological warfare programs and outbreaks of emerging diseases managed by these and other agencies include several articles in The New Yorker magazine, Mr. Preston's best-selling nonfiction books The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, Panic in Level 4, and factual background information in his popular novel The Cobra Event.

The deficiencies in Meselson's first academic report on the Sverdlovsk outbreak are contemporaneous with Meselson's reports on Yellow Rain. Dr. Meselson seems to have read Peter Gumbel's article in the Wall Street Journal pointing out that Meselson's dismissal of the anthrax outbreak at Sverdlovsk as being due to "bad meat" from a meat packing plant in Aramil shows a lack of due diligence on Meselson's part - no meat packing plant ever existed in Aramil, a fact Gumbel established by visiting the town of Aramil personally.

Mr. Gumbel also visited area hospitals and made inquiries into the prevalence of anthrax infection during the outbreak. Despite strict KGB censorship on the subject and KGB attempts to dissuade and intimidate Mr. Gumbel, he was able to get first-person accounts from families of people who died in the outbreak, survivors of the outbreak, and medical personnel who treated victims. Gumbel was able to discover that death and illness from the outbreak among civilian residents of Sverdlovsk was much greater than Meselson or the Soviets reported just after the incident.

Subsequent reports by Peter Gumbel of the Wall Street Journal and Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov (second-in-command of Biopreparat, the Soviet biological weapons program whose facility in downtown Sverdlovsk was the source of the anthrax outbreak there) show that Meselson's methodology in determining the source of the anthrax outbreak consisted mainly of rephrasing statements from Soviet officials, with little success in independently ascertaining the facts of the case.

Meselson was very publicly hostile to suggestions that the Soviet government was active in biological warfare until the defections of the second and third-highest officials in Biopreparat made it clear that the Soviet Union had actually increased the tempo of their work in biological and biotoxic warfare after Leonid Brezhnev signed the Biological Warfare Convention in 1975, along with the heads of government from the other two repository governments of the treaty, the US and UK. This may have affected his willingness to pursue the truth until it was uncovered by a lay journalist - Mr. Gumbel of the Wall Street Journal.

In Meselson's and several other researchers' second paper on the Sverdlovsk outbreak, almost every salient point of Meselson's first "High-quality peer-reviewed review article" on the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak had to be retracted.

We now know from the account of the second-in-command of the Soviet biological warfare development and production program, Dr. Ken Alibek (b. Kanatjan Alibekov) that failure to properly install filters on an anthrax-grinding machine was responsible for weaponized anthrax being vented to the air in Sverdlovsk, with the tragic results outlined in the second Meselson study.

The error-ridden first Meselson study on Sverdlovsk was published at approximately the same time as his "yellow rain" studies and reports.

This being the case, it's reasonable to ask whether Meselson was any more successful in finding and reporting the truth on "yellow rain" than he was on the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, given the almost complete failure of the first Meselson study to convey the truth about it.

When characterizing how authoritative Meselson's "yellow rain" reports (or other publications depending on Meselson's work) are likely to have been, you have to look at the facts on the ground.

Something happened in Laos, according to the few Hmong who were able to make it out to refugee camps across the Laotian border. Any consensus arrived at on the basis of Meselson's perceptions and public statements is not particularly broad-based - it's simply congenial to one particular segment of public opinion which was hostile to the administration in power at the time of the "yellow rain" attacks.

Meselson's public statements in the early 1980s on the Sverdlovsk outbreak AND the reports of a biotoxic attack on Hmong tribesmen in rural Laos were extremely contentious and seem to have been written to support partisan political attacks on the Reagan administration.

To characterize Dr. Meselson's public comments (and articles by others which depend on Meselson's work) on "yellow rain" as "High-quality peer-reviewed review articles" is not encyclopedic.

To state, as this article now does, that there is no controversy among competent authorities that "yellow rain" was NOT biotoxic warfare, is NOT NPOV. It is the consensus of one side in an ongoing controversy.

Finally, the complete omission of Asian affairs correspondent Sterling Seagrave's 1981 book Yellow Rain, an even-handed survey of Soviet and US work in biotoxic, chemical and biological warfare from known facts at the time of publication is puzzling, if one assumes good faith on the part of the editor(s) who wrote the article. Seagrave's book is nothing if not exhaustive in its coverage of the title topic and his attempt to place it within the context of known work in CBW. Why was it omitted?

I am at present researching the topic with a view to making the WP article "Yellow Rain" NPOV and more accurately determining what sort of consensus actually exists among those who have studied the incident and its sequelae. We owe our readers (and ourselves as editors of the free encyclopedia) no less. loupgarous (talk) 16:12, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Article and prospective book
There's an interesting article here which mentions the yellow rain dispute. It's probably a bit tangential to provide a great source but the author (Peter Pringle) concludes by saying he's researching a book on it.SoulRebel56 (talk) 11:17, 27 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Also on a tangent the March 1984 New Scientist actually covers both yellow rain controversies - in the context of South-East Asia and the then-ongoing Iran-Iraq war - in the same issue. In both cases the tone is sceptical (attributing the deaths to mouldy food and mustard gas respectively). -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 15:00, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

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X-Files
Maybe it's noteworthy that an episode of The X-Files, El Mundo Gira, is built around a yellow rain type of event. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.130.22.182 (talk) 09:38, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Way to go, Wikipedia
Maybe the editor who wanted to nominate this article for "Featured" should read this first. - 2601:58B:4200:2F10:81C:C1D3:EB0B:89BC (talk) 16:05, 5 October 2019 (UTC)