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Home » Chem-Bio » BioShield: Bad News

BioShield: Bad News

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.
anthrax_capitol.jpgSince 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.

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September 18th, 2006 | Chem-Bio | 33086 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/09/18/bioshield-bad-news/BioShield%3A+Bad+News2006-09-19+01%3A57%3A23noahmax You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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  1. Brian says:
    September 19, 2006 at 8:53 am

    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.

    Reply
  2. Haninah says:
    September 19, 2006 at 10:30 am

    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​.new​sci​en​tist​.com/​c​h​a​n​n​e​l​/​h​e​a​l​t​h​/​d​n​1​0​0​1​3​-​c​y​s​t​i​c​-​f​i​b​r​o​s​i​s​-​g​e​n​e​-​p​r​o​t​e​c​t​s​-​a​g​a​i​n​s​t​-​t​u​b​e​r​c​u​l​o​s​i​s​.​h​tml). 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.”

    Reply
  3. Brian says:
    September 20, 2006 at 10:59 am

    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.

    Reply
  4. Karen says:
    June 13, 2007 at 3:24 pm

    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.

    Reply

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