This story about “Project BioShield,” the government’s botched effort to build up a vaccine supply against anthrax and other bioterror threats, is a nice wrap-up of one of the administration’s most troubled homeland security efforts (and that’s saying a lot). But the story also kind of misses, or at least sidesteps, the point.
Since it was introduced in 2003, the core of the BioShield program has been a slow-motion trainwreck. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to get this new supply of vaccine — with few results to show for it.
But the real tragedy may be in the billions of research dollars BioShield is twisting around. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is now spending “$1.7 billion on biodefense — up from just $42 million in 2001 — out of a $4.3 billion budget,” Time noted earlier in the year. That’s to fight bioagents which are really, really hard to turn into weapons — and even when they are weaponized, don’t kill all that many. Remember the 2001 anthrax attack? Five people dead. “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… the Federation of American Scientists.
UCLA’s Dr. Marcus Howritz was “on the cusp of real progress” in developing a better TB vaccine… 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 “actually do kill people,” she notes.
But the redirection of resources may not be the worst part. It’s where all this semi-questionable research is happening that’s truly spooky. The government is funding the construction of a bazillion new “hot zone” labs, packed with the deadliest of biothreats. And it’s these labs that are the most likely sources of an outbreak. Because safety at these places ain’t exactly iron-clad. Three Boston University lab workers were infected with tularemia, or rabbit fever, back in January, 2005. Nine months later, plague-ridden mice escaped from Connell’s lab in New Jersey. Thanks, BioShield.
Yeah. “On the cusp of real progress”. Right. So a researcher’s pet project, one that by his own admission, has had very little success, gets its funding cut.
I’m sure TB kills a lot of people. But it’s gonna be insanely hard to weaponize. So I’m not worried.
I think you completely missed the point of the post, Brian. The question is not whether TB can be weaponized. It’s a major threat to humans both inside and outside the US without being weaponized.
Yes, the vast majority of the millions of people who die of it every year are dying in countries we don’t seem to care about (not that there aren’t deaths in the US, and lots of them in countries like Russia that we do care about). But when drug-resistant strains emerge (that’s not a future tense, it’s a present tense, as you’d know if you were reading the news last week, for example), they spread. Unlike, say, anthrax, TB is a highly contagious disease.
How bad is TB? “Between 1600 and 1900, TB caused 20% of all deaths in Europe.” (http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn10013-cystic-fibrosis-gene-protects-against-tuberculosis.html). That means that one in five of your ancestors (I’m assuming) probably died not from old age, and not from cancer, and not from a sharp pointy object, but from TB.
I’m not saying you should lose sleep and sell your stocks because of the coming TB plague. I’m just saying, don’t be so quick to dismiss something as a threat to national security, and to your security, just because it doesn’t come in a package postmarked “Tora Bora.”
Well, I understand that, but so what? It’s not like the push to develop treatments for diseases likely to be used in terror attacks is going to cause other research to grind to a halt.
We make decisions every day on how we spend our research dollars. TB may become a super-killer in the future, or it may not. There’s no way to tell.
One year later.…are you worried now Brian.…you should be!!!!!!! I have direct knowledge of a potential cure for TB that has not been able to get funding because of all this NONSENSE! And we have our first XDRTB in a “regular” US citizen…and we all freaked out. AGAIN I have direct knowledge that a person in Nepal with XDRTB was supposedly going to get on plane and come to the US, “because there might be something that could be done in a US hospital that isn’t available in Nepal.” SO there’s one no one knows about…on a plane, with I’m sure a more active case than Speaks had…I was cut off from anymore communication when I strongly objected to the travel and sent a copy of the WHO air travel guidelines before I could ID the person and I was skeptical at the time anyone would believe me if I tried to tell someone. And I’m just “joe citizen”…who do I think I am accusing someone of something when I couldn’t even ID them!
WHEN are we going to wake up!!!!!! It’s not the terrorists that are going to kill us with this stuff…it’s normal everyday people, ignorant people…but “normal” non-the-less.