Anybody know what happened to New Orleans’ anthrax labs? That’s the excellent and scary question Defense Tech pal Russ Kick asks over at the Memory Hole.
In and around the Big Easy are a number of Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) labs, meant to handle some of the nastier biological agents out there — stuff like anthrax, plague, and genetically-engineering mousepox. Louisiana State Universitys Medical School and the State of Louisiana both ran BSL-3s within the city. Tulane kept 5,000 monkeys for biodefense studies in its “National Primate Research Center,” located in nearby Covington.
“What’s happened to the infected animals? Are they free and roaming?” Russ wants to know. “Are they dead, with their diseased bodies floating in the flood waters? And what about the cultures and vials of the diseases? Are they still secure? Are they being stolen? Were they washed away, now forming part of the toxic soup that coats the city?“
And not to turn the fear dial up any higher, but, if the national average is any guide, the keepers of the Louisiana labs weren’t particularly experienced. 97 percent of the “principal investigators” who got biodefense grants from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases were newbies to that kind of work.
The government oversight these neophytes get is minimal, at best. Instead, the labs are expected to police themselves, through “Institutional Biosafety Committees.” But the records of these committees is, to put it politely, uneven. When the Sunshine Project, a biowatchdog group, “asked for all minutes of all meetings of [Tulane’s] IBC since January 1st, 2002, Tulane replied that it has no responsive documents. That is, Tulane University cannot produce a single page of minutes of any Institutional Biosafety Committee meeting for the past two and half years.“
THERE’S MORE: “What happened to all the cargo at the Port?” wonders Adam Rogers, Defense Tech’s editor at Wired. “In October of 2001, the executive director of the Port of New Orleans, Gary LaGrange, told me that the Port of New Orleans has about a quarter of all the containerized cargo traffic on the Gulf of Mexico. It was the countrys largest importer of steel, rubber, and coffee. Steel was going down drastically, but still. But what always really interested me the most was that New Orleans was the largest London Metals Exchange port in the country thats precious metals. Platinum and gold dont rust…”
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NoLa’s Biolab Mystery
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“Russ Kick asks over at the Memory Hole“
lol, that sounds funny.
Yet another example of the incompetence of Lousiana state government. They put these labs in not just a flood plain, but a city that is below sea level and in hurricane territory.
I used to work at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, which has one of the premier infectious disease programs in the world and is also a hurricane magnet. As part of the university’s emergency plan they had strict protocols for the destruction of all animals and microbes. Usually they would make the call to destroy everything about 24 hours in advance. My guess is that this is what happened here as well, as federal guidelines require plans for just these kinds of contingencies.
By the way, calling the Sunshine Group a biowatchdog group is a little like calling Moveon.org a public advocacy group. They are a very leftwing group who are completely opposed to this kind of research.
Reminds me of a line from a Country Joe and the Fish song:
Ain’t no time to wonder why
Yippee! We’re all gonna die.
Yet another example of the incompetence of Federal government that oversees all such labs. They put these labs in not just a flood plain, but in a city that is below sea level and in hurricane territory.
Speaking as a former intern at the Oregon PRC, I’d suggest that even though the principal investigators may have been “newbies”, there is a highly capable set of veterinarians that actually interact with the animals. They are likely to be long-term staff.
Consider it this way: the PIs come up with experiments and then their techs actually come up with the experiments. The techs work with the vet techs and the vets to actually ‘experiment’ upon the monkeys. So I’m guessing that it’s the vets/vet techs that you have to wonder about. Cell biologists are far to academic to actually want to care for or interact with the animals they’re working on.
That’s not to say they’re inhumane; it’s just to say that they’re more interested in the science. The vets are the ones who deal with the monkeys.
“What’s happened to the infected animals? Are they free and roaming?” Russ wants to know. “Are they dead, with their diseased bodies floating in the flood waters? And what about the cultures and vials of the diseases? Are they still secure? Are they being stolen? Were they washed away, now forming part of the toxic soup that coats the city?“
Geez people, it’s not hard to find out. Check the messages from Scott Cowen, the Tulane President, at http://www.tulane.edu. You can see his older messages here. In his words, from Sept. 5th, ” I am happy to report that our National Primate Center in Covington, La. is already functioning under near normal conditions.“
Yawn, that was hard.
Curses, hyperlinks don’t work, d’oh.
Older Tulane messages are here:
http://www.tulane.edu/past.html
While it’s certainly good news that the monkeys and any possible contagion vectors from the Tulane PRC are contained, the question about the labs in New Orleans bears further investigation.
While I’m sure they have systems in place to deal with containment, I’d be interested to know if any were breached due to the severity of flooding, winds and subsequent loss of services. I’m sure most on-site generators are running low on fuel.
Well, at least that gives me something to do tonight.
–Jason
Ah spoot. I’m both happy and not so happy that some public attention is getting on this story. I’m happy cause now the people know about it, and I’m not so happy cause if any terrorist cells around here haven’t already looked into it…they will now. Ah well.
Those of you unfamiliar with NOLA and surrounding geography would do well to look at a map. May I suggest you go to yahoo maps and type in Covington, LA? Covington is NOT in N.O. It is across Lake Pontchartrain and a little bit inland from the lake. (The causeway across the lake is 26 miles long — longest bridge in the world — another tidbit that is interesting in N.O. trivia). That area did not get flooded. It did have some wind damage from downed trees etc.
I’ve been looking into this. It looks like all is okay at the NOLA biolabs.
Here’s what veteran LSU anthrax research Professor Hugh-Jones wrote me the following in email correspondence over the last few days:
“Off the cuff I would not expect a great threat as without electricity the refridgerators will slowly warm up and thus kill any stored organisms. Ditto any liquid nitrogen storage devices. And anyone breaking in has to know exactly where to go to get what. I very much doubt that there were any hidden Al Qaida cells lurking in sinful Catholic New Orleans.“
”…the present BSL-3 labs now have locks, some merchanical, some electronic/electric. So anyone wanting to break into such a lab in a possibly abandoned LSU or Tulane or LADHHS building in New Orleans will have to have a sledgehammer with them.“
“However yesterday I had the opportunity of discussing this problem with Dr Raoult Ratard, the Louisiana State Epidemiologist, who temporarily has his office & staff in Baton Rouge. He said that they got police permission to open the LADHHS PHS BSL-3 lab, and suitably supervised they cut the chain on the door, got in, poured chlorox into their single vial of Brucellas suis from a recent investigation — all that was in the laboratory — and then got on with the real business which was to recover the two laptop computers in the lab (using the bolt cutter again) which they really needed in Baton Rouge.”
There were also independent bioresearch labs in and about New Orleans with, again, primates and animals and bioagents.
LSU reported that it’s facility was flooded.
How many labs, what kind of bioagents? Were the animals floating? Bioagent in liquid nitrogen, not evacuated.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread170401/pg1
DO some research next time retard… Covington is not in New Orleans
“In Covington, just north of New Orleans, Tulane’s high-security National Primate Research Center reported only minor damage and said none of its 5,000 research animals escaped. “
SOURCE: AP
Wakeup and Gretna Native,
No, you do your research before falsely accusing the author of writing or meaning something that he did NOT write or mean. The context of New Orelans in the article is the Metropolis of New Orelans, not the City of New Orelans. The Metropolis includes Covington. I don’t live in the district of Washington, DC; but I do live in the metropolis of Washington, DC. If someone says that I am located in Washington, DC; that is not necessarily wrong. Get a life you two as there are more important things about which to worry!