BOSTON BIO-​​BOTCH: GET READY FOR MORE

Boston was only the begin­ning. With so many biode­fense labs being built across the coun­try, you can expect to see more news like the weekend’s rev­e­la­tion that three Boston University lab work­ers were infected with tularemia, or rab­bit fever.
Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has been pour­ing money into labs that research the dead­liest of bioa­gents. “Currently there are four [max­i­mum secu­rity] Biosafety Level 4 lab­o­ra­to­ries nation­wide, with six more planned,” the New York Times notes. “50 lab­o­ra­to­ries oper­ate at Biosafety Level 3, suf­fi­cient to work with anthrax, and 19 more are planned at uni­ver­si­ties and gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions, accord­ing to the Sunshine Project, a Texas group that is track­ing the growth.“
With these labs flow­er­ing so quickly, “hun­dreds of inex­pe­ri­enced researchers [are being drawn] into work with haz­ardous organ­isms,” the Times adds. Security is being com­pro­mised, as a result.

In 2002, the dis­cov­ery of lethal anthrax out­side a high-​​security lab­o­ra­tory at the military’s pre­mier biode­fense lab­o­ra­tory, the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, led to sam­pling through­out the insti­tute. Investigators found three dif­fer­ent strains of anthrax bac­te­ria out­side the sealed-​​off lab­o­ra­to­ries, indi­cat­ing at least that many leaks, accord­ing to an Army report.
Then, last spring, Southern Research Institute, a con­trac­tor in Frederick, Md., shipped anthrax bac­te­ria to an Oakland, Calif., hos­pi­tal after immers­ing it in hot water to kill the germs. When mice injected with the sup­pos­edly harm­less bac­te­ria for a vac­cine exper­i­ment quickly died, researchers real­ized the bac­te­ria were still lethal. 

The list goes on. “A US Army-​​funded biosafety level three lab in Tennessee that holds bio­log­i­cal weapons agents… hasn’t had an Army biosafety inspec­tion in three years,” the Sunshine Project notes. Tulane University, which runs a sim­i­lar cen­ter, hasn’t con­vened its biosafety com­mit­tee in years. Since 1998, the safety group at Rockefeller University in New York City “has met exactly twice,” accord­ing to the Project.
Now, all of this might be per­fectly accept­able, if these labs were really help­ing to save lives. But that’s a ques­tion­able propo­si­tion, at best. Because many of the agents being inves­ti­gated at these labs are only mar­ginal threats to pub­lic health.
These bioa­gents are noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to turn into weapons. And, with a delib­er­ate spread, they aren’t hurt­ing that many peo­ple. There are only 130 cases per year of tularemia. Smallpox isn’t infect­ing any­one these days. And the anthrax that killed five peo­ple in 2001 — that prob­a­bly came from one of these biode­fense cen­ters.
“Compare that to a real bio­log­i­cal killer, like tuber­cu­lo­sis,” I sug­gested in a 2003 Tech Central Station article.

It ends the life of more than 2 mil­lion peo­ple every year. But the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is “lur­ing researchers away” from sci­en­tific research into TB and other infec­tions of mass destruc­tion, notes Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, with the Federation of American Scientists.
UCLA’s Dr. Marcus Howritz was “on the cusp of real progress” in devel­op­ing a bet­ter TB vac­cine, Merrill Goozner reports in this month’s American Prospect. Now he’s been diverted into work­ing on a barely-​​lethal bio­log­i­cal agent.
Nancy Connell, who heads a Pentagon-​​funded bio-​​defense lab in Newark, NJ, doesn’t think a bio­log­i­cal strike is all that likely. But she takes grants to study small­pox and anthrax, because she can use the same research funds to work on flu and TB, which “actu­all do kill peo­ple,” she notes. 

January 24th, 2005 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.