By Kirsty Needham

SYDNEY (Reuters) – A former U.S. Marine pilot fighting extradition from Australia on U.S. charges of training Chinese military pilots to land on aircraft carriers, unknowingly worked with a Chinese hacker, his lawyer said.

Daniel Duggan, 55, a naturalised Australian citizen, feared requests by Western intelligence agencies for sensitive information were putting his family at risk, the lawyer said in a legal filing seen by Reuters.

The lawyer’s filing supports Reuters reporting linking Duggan to convicted Chinese defence hacker Su Bin.

Duggan denies the allegations that he broke U.S. arms control laws. He has been in an Australian maximum security prison since his 2022 arrest after returning from six years working in Beijing.

U.S. authorities found correspondence with Duggan on electronic devices seized from Su Bin, Duggan’s lawyer Bernard Collaery said in the March submission to Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, who will decide whether to surrender Duggan to the U.S. after a magistrate hears Duggan’s extradition case.

The case will be heard in a Sydney court this month, two years after his arrest in rural Australia at a time when Britain was warning its former military pilots not to work for China.

Su Bin, arrested in Canada in 2014, pleaded guilty in 2016 to theft of U.S. military aircraft designs by hacking major U.S. defence contractors. He is listed among seven co-conspirators with Duggan in the extradition request.

Duggan knew Su Bin as an employment broker for Chinese state aviation company AVIC, lawyer Collaery wrote, and the hacking case was “totally unrelated to our client”.

Although Su Bin “may have had improper connection to (Chinese) agents this was unknown to our client”, Duggan’s lawyer wrote.

‘OVERT INTELLIGENCE CONTACT’

AVIC was blacklisted by the U.S. last year as a Chinese military-linked company.

Messages retrieved from Su Bin’s electronic devices show he paid for Duggan’s travel from Australia to Beijing in May 2012, according to extradition documents lodged by the United States with the Australian court.

Duggan asked Su Bin to help source Chinese aircraft parts for his Top Gun tourist flight business in Australia, Collaery wrote.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and U.S. Navy criminal investigators knew Duggan was training pilots for AVIC and met him in Australia’s Tasmania state in December 2012 and February 2013, his lawyer wrote.

ASIO and the U.S. Navy Criminal Investigation Service did not respond to Reuters requests for comment on the meetings. ASIO has previously said it would not comment as the matter was before the court.

“An ASIO officer suggested that while carrying on his legitimate business operations in China, Mr Duggan may be able to gather sensitive information,” his lawyer wrote.

Duggan moved to China in 2013 and was barred from leaving the country in 2014, his lawyer said. Duggan’s LinkedIn profile and aviation sources who knew him said he was working in China as an aviation consultant in 2013 and 2014.

He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2016 at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, backdated to 2012 on a certificate, after “overt intelligence contact by U.S. authorities that may have compromised his family safety”, his lawyer wrote.

His lawyers oppose extradition, arguing there is no evidence the Chinese pilots he trained were military and that he became an Australian citizen in January 2012, before the alleged offences.

The United States government has argued Duggan did not lose his U.S. citizenship until 2016.

(Reporting by Kirsty Needham in Sydney; Editing by William Mallard)

Government scientists are warning consumers to stay away from raw milk, citing research showing “high viral load” of avian influenza in samples collected from infected cows — as well as a disturbing cluster of dead barn cats who’d consumed contaminated raw milk.

“We continue to strongly advise against the consumption of raw milk,” said Donald Prater, acting director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the Food and Drug Administration.

But raw milk enthusiasts are doubling down on the claimed benefits and safety of their favorite elixir, and say the government warnings are nothing more than “fearmongering.”

Mark McAfee, founder of Fresno’s Raw Farm and the Raw Milk Institute, said his phone has been ringing off the hook with “customers asking for H5N1 milk because they want immunity from it.” (Bird flu has not been detected in California’s dairy herds.)

Other raw milk drinkers, such as Peg Coleman, a medical microbiologist who runs Coleman Scientific Consulting, a Groton, N.Y.-based food safety consulting company, claimed the government’s warnings have no basis in reality.

Coleman, who is an advisor to the Raw Milk Institute, has provided expert testimony on the benefits of the unpasteurized dairy product in courtrooms across the nation.

“It’s a fear factor. It’s an opinion factor. It’s based on 19th century evidence. It’s absolutely ridiculous,” she said, citing research that shows healthy gut biomes and breast milk provide immune system benefits.

The process of heating milk to a specific temperature for a specific period of time and then allowing it to rapidly chill is named for the French chemist and germ theory pioneer Louis Pasteur. Recently, the FDA reaffirmed the effectiveness of pasteurization in destroying Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) and other viruses, as well as harmful pathogenic bacteria and other microorganisms.

Coleman, however, says the risk of illness are overblown.

“This is all people’s opinions, their gut feelings, their ignorance,” she said. “I think that if there were a study done, and the microbiota of raw milk drinkers was tested, you might very well find a healthier gut microbiota that’s better able to withstand occasional challenges.”

It’s a message that health officers and food safety experts say is dangerous and foolhardy, especially at a time when government investigators are scrambling to understand the extent of dairy herd outbreaks, and the potential for harm.

“Deliberating consuming raw milk in the hope of becoming immune to avian influenza is playing Russian roulette with your health,” said Michael Payne, a researcher and outreach coordinator at the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at UC Davis. “Deliberately trying to infect yourself with a known pathogen flies in the face of all medical knowledge and common sense.”

He and other food safety experts say the safest way to consume dairy is to ingest only pasteurized milk products.

“It’s been the gold standard for more than a century,” he said.

The highly pathogenic avian influenza virus has been found in 36 herds in nine states, and detected in samples of commercially sold, pasteurized milk. Testing has shown those viral fragments to be inactive — neutralized by the pasteurization process.

The live virus, on the other hand, has been detected in raw cow’s milk and colostrum — the nutrient rich milk expressed by mammals in the first days after giving birth — and a study that examined dead barn cats at bird-flu-infected dairies in Texas and Kansas suggests contaminated raw milk could be dangerous for other mammals, including humans.

However, the researchers were unable to definitively show the cats acquired the virus via raw milk; it is possible they consumed diseased birds.

It’s a point that Coleman has seized on — highlighting it as proof that the government’s caution regarding drinking raw milk is specious.

“Show me that it infected the cats through the GI tract,” she said. “Otherwise, you are just … crying wolf trying to blame raw milk or saying … that raw milk is inherently dangerous, even when the scientific evidence does not support that opinion.”

She noted that the cats’ symptoms were not gastrointestinal in nature. Instead, they developed depressed mental states, their bodies showed stiff movements, they lost coordination, produced discharge from their eyes and noses, and suffered blindness. More than half of the farms’ cats died. She said even if the cats had contracted the virus via the milk, it was likely a result of breathing in milk droplets rather than from consuming it.

“Have you ever seen a cat eat?” asked Coleman. “It’s messy. If they got the disease from the milk, it’s probably because they breathed it in.”

Eric Burrough, a professor and veterinary diagnostic pathologist at Iowa State University who led the cat study, acknowledged that there were things they were unable to control for and other things “we do not know”; the analysis was “diagnostic.”

But he and his team were able to show that the cats fed on contaminated raw milk with high concentrations of the virus and that the pattern of infection and death “does not align with random exposure to wild birds,” he said.

As for Coleman and McAfee’s belief that stomach acid and a healthy gut biome would offer protection, he noted previous studies that showed cats eating wild birds did get the virus, suggesting those safeguards are not sufficient to protect mammals against bird flu.

He said “there is also the possibility that virus could enter via the tonsils in the pharynx of the cats prior to ingestion in both the bird consumption and milk consumption scenarios.”

In any case, said Payne, there’s enough concern out there right now that should give people pause about consuming dairy products that have not been pasteurized.

Even Coleman acknowledged that toddlers and young children — who have been known to be messy eaters — might consume milk differently than adults. And if her messy eating theory has weight with the cats, “it’s something to think about” with children.

So far, the virus does not seem to have evolved any genetic adaptations that would make it more amenable to pass between people.

Only one person — a Texas dairy worker infected in March — has so far been reported to have acquired the disease from cattle. His symptoms were mild — just a moderate case of conjunctivitis, or pink eye, according to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Local and state health departments have tested about 25 other people for the virus and monitored more than 100 for symptoms.

This particular bird flu virus originated in China in 1996, but the clade — or subvariant, known as 2.3.4.4b — found in U.S. dairy cattle became dominant in 2020. It has since killed hundreds of millions of domestic and wild birds — and has been detected on every continent except Australia. It has also jumped to mammals, and is responsible for killing at least 48 different species, including elephant seals, dolphins and sea lions.

Researchers now believe this clade of H5N1 virus was introduced by birds to cattle at one site in the Texas Panhandle, and then spread by cattle-to-cattle transmission as cows were moved between different farms. Evidence also shows that infections have spread from cattle to domestic poultry. And samples have been discovered in wastewater.

There have been 887 confirmed cases of H5N1 human infection across 23 countries since 2003. Of those, 462 were fatal. It is unclear if there were more mild cases that went undetected, something that could potentially reduce the 52% fatality rate.

However, epidemiologists say HPAI is dangerous — and potentially fatal. Considering the global, cross-species spread of illness, they are urging people to be cautious and avoid raw milk.

A Massachusetts man has died nearly two months after he made history as the first recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney transplant, his family and the hospital that performed the procedure announced Saturday.

Richard Slayman, 62, had the transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in March, when surgeons predicted the pig kidney would last for at least two years.

The transplant team at the hospital said in a statement it was deeply saddened by Slayman’s death and offered condolences to his family. The hospital said there was no indication he died because of the transplant.

Slayman was the first living person to undergo the procedure, but pig kidneys had previously been temporarily transplanted into brain-dead donors. Two men received heart transplants from pigs, but both died within months.

MASSACHUSETTS MAN, RECIPIENT OF FIRST SUCCESSFUL PIG KIDNEY TRANSPLANT, IS DISCHARGED FROM HOSPITAL

Richard Slayman (second from right) died nearly two months after he made history as the first recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney transplant. (Courtesy of Michelle Rose/Massachusetts General Hospital)

After having a kidney transplant at the hospital in 2018, Slayman had to go back on dialysis last year because it showed signs of failure. Then, after dialysis complications came up and required frequent procedures, his doctors suggested a pig kidney transplant.

Slayman’s family thanked his doctors for extending his life.

“Their enormous efforts leading the xenotransplant gave our family seven more weeks with Rick, and our memories made during that time will remain in our minds and hearts,” the family said in a statement.

The family said Slayman underwent the surgery, in part, to provide hope for the thousands of people who also require a transplant to live.

MASSACHUSETTS MAN RECEIVES SUCCESSFUL PIG KIDNEY TRANSPLANT: ‘UNCHARTED TERRITORY’

Richard Slayman with (left to right) Dr. Leo Riella, Medical Director of Kidney Transplantation, Dr. Nahel Elias, Interim Chief, Division of Transplant Surgery, his partner, Faren, and Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, Director, Legorreta Center for Clinical Transplant Tolerance (Courtesy of Michelle Rose/Massachusetts General Hospital)

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“Rick accomplished that goal and his hope and optimism will endure forever,” the family said.

Xenotransplantation refers to healing human patients with cells, tissues or organs from animals. These attempts have long been unsuccessful because the human immune system immediately destroys foreign animal tissue. Recent attempts have included pigs that have been modified, so their organs more closely resemble those of a human.

More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list for a transplant, with most of them being kidney patients. Thousands of people die every year before they receive a transplant.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.