This is in response to Dr. Klempner's post stating that smallpox will not be studied at the BU's proposed lab. This infectious agent and disease are clearly listed in the Final Environmental Impact Report, vol. 2, appendix 2-9 as an infectious agent that may be studied at the NEIDL. Since this report was prepared by BU and was approved by both NIH and MEPA, the inclusion of Variola major as a possible agent to be studied in the NEIDL must be taken seriously. The fact that research on smallpox is currently restricted in an international agreement should not be seen as hindering this possibility. In the past several years, the US government has shown that they are willing to toss aside long-standing international agreements, such as the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as block discussion on any verification mechanism to the Biological Weapons Convention. When asked about this in a community meeting, Dr. Klempner and Murphy had no explanation. If BU and NIH claim that their inclusion of Variola major as an agent researched in lab in their FEIR is an over-sight, then it is a gross and dangerous over-sight and calls into question the level of attention went into the entire review process.
Sincerely,
Marc Pelletier
Boston, MA
High-Stakes Science
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More Research, More Risk
The country is now criss-crossed with labs containing biohazardous material. Also, a photo history of hazmat suits: How to dress for distress
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Biologist Thomas Geisbert knows the drill. When Boston University's National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories opens sometime in 2008, he and his wife Joan, also a biologist, will conduct experiments in the building's most secure facility: a dense concrete bunker that has been described as a safe within a submarine and that requires FBI clearance to access. Several times a day they will change from street clothes to scrubs, then to spacesuits, hook themselves up to plastic coiled air hoses, endure a seven-minute chemical shower, and clear at least three retinal scanners before entering the lab itself. The facility is known as a BSL4 lab, for "biosafety level 4"—the highest level of lab security. Once inside, the couple will study the world's deadliest pathogens—those with no known cure. For Geisbert the risk is worth it. "There is so much fertile ground at this stage of research," he says. "So much work that hasn't been done yet."
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But whether or not they get to work at all may depend on how the surrounding community, and by extension the nation, resolves its concerns about what has become a well-funded but poorly regulated national research program. Before the anthrax mailings of 2001, the United States had just two BSL4 labs—both within the razor-wire confines of government-owned campuses. Now, thanks to a tenfold increase in funding—from $200 million in 2001 to $2 billion in 2006—more than a dozen such facilities can be found at universities and private companies across the country.
That expansion has touched off a battle over how and where we should study such pathogens. Natural outbreaks of incurable diseases (including a Rift Valley fever outbreak that killed more than 100 people in Sudan earlier this month) continually underscore the need for high-containment research—as does the ever-present threat of bioterrorism. Yet more labs, money and scientists dedicated to this line of work create only more opportunities for the accidental or intentional release of something truly horrendous. "In 1999 there were about six research groups working on anthrax; today there are about 200," says Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, a watchdog group that has been monitoring the unprecedented lab expansion. "You can't scale up like that without risking major problems."
A report by the Government Accountability Office recently found more than 100 security failures at high-containment labs (which include those rated BSL4 and the next-highest level, BSL3)—including cases of infected lab workers and missing stocks of virus and bacteria. A ferret infected with bird flu bit a lab worker in Maryland. Three plague-infected mice went missing from a New Jersey lab, and at the Fort Detrick military lab, anthrax-causing bacteria were found on a freezer handle and light switch. But at the same military facility the Geisberts helped discover a vaccine that may one day be used to protect humans from Ebola.
Citizen's groups have sued Boston University in an attempt to keep the Geisbert's nearly finished BSL4 lab (the first to be built in the densely populated Northeastern Corridor) from opening. A risk assessment by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—which provided $128 million for the lab's construction—concluded that Boston was as safe a location for the facility as any less populated area. But last week the National Academies of Science (NAS) sided with a state judge and community activists when it determined that that assessment was not "sound and credible."
"They only considered the scenarios that would give them the outcome they wanted," says Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, who was not involved in the NAS assessment. For example, NIH's worst-case scenario included the accidental release of a virus that is transmitted through cattle, but not one transmitted through rodents, which are obviously more prevalent in urban Boston. NIH also failed to factor in the health of the local neighborhood, which has a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS and would be particularly threatened by the release of an infectious agent.
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