DEADLY FLU SHIPS; BIOSAFETY M.I.A.

This is a night­mare. But it’s not a surprise.

A dan­ger­ous strain of the flu virus that caused a world­wide pan­demic in 1957 was sent to thou­sands of lab­o­ra­to­ries in the United States and around the world, trig­ger­ing a fran­tic effort to destroy the sam­ples to pre­vent an out­break, health offi­cials revealed yes­ter­day.

With the gov­ern­ment toss­ing out biode­fense research grants like Louisville Sluggers on Bat Day, uni­ver­si­ties and pri­vate com­pa­nies by the dozen have been build­ing labs to han­dle the nas­ti­est bac­te­ria and viruses around. As a result, “hun­dreds of inex­pe­ri­enced researchers [are being drawn] into work with haz­ardous organ­isms,” the Times observed a few months back.
But the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is largely leav­ing over­sight of these labs up to the col­leges and com­pa­nies them­selves, the bio-​​watchers at the Sunshine Project note. Each insti­tu­tion is sup­posed to be policed by a home-​​grown “biosafety com­mit­tee.” But, as of last sum­mer, at least, “some three dozen lab­o­ra­to­ries” receiv­ing fed­eral biode­fense dol­lars hadn’t even set their com­mit­tees up.
When these com­mit­tees are active, they often work in secret. So no one from the out­side the lab has a good idea what’s going on inside. There’s lit­tle, if any, inde­pen­dent safety advice. And that makes it eas­ier for potentially-​​deadly mis­takes — like dis­trib­ut­ing an ultra-​​dangerous flu strain to thou­sands of sites scat­tered around the globe.
“As if recent tularemia inci­dents, SARS escapes, and the myr­iad of other acci­dents in recent years were not enough,” writes the Sunshine Project’s Edward Hammond. “When will researchers and reg­u­la­tors come to grips with the inevitabil­ity of human error and equip­ment fail­ures and restrict research and require trans­parency (as a restrain­ing mea­sure) — by law — as is so obvi­ously required?“
THERE’S MORE: POGO has put together a creepy time­line of biosafety mishaps over the last three years.

April 13th, 2005 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.