- 'From the Lab' Updates of various lab stories from Mary
Wulff:
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- By Independent Staff http://www.missoulanews.com/Archives/News.asp?no=3864
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- Rocky Mountain Laboratory workers arrived at work to
feed research animals on the morning of Sunday, Feb. 8, and found dead
monkeys.
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- During the night, a thermostat malfunction had spiked
temperatures in the animal holding facility to 100 degrees, compared to
the 72 degree norm. An emergency alarm went off, but the signal didn't
reach facility guards, even though they,re on-site 24 hours a day. The
death toll included 13 squirrel monkeys and 74 hamsters used in Chronic
Wasting Disease research. Thirteen additional squirrel monkeys survived
the ordeal, as well as all 14 of the macaque monkeys. The monkeys that
died were confined in cages close to the ceiling, where hot air collected.
The alarm mechanism has since been rewired to better notify guards of future
episodes. But at a time when the facility is trying to convince the public
of the safety merits of a proposed biosafety Level 4 expansion' the monkey
incident casts doubts on the lab's credibility. If granted Level 4 status,
the lab will be handling more than just monkeys. It will be in charge of
protecting Hamilton from the deadly viruses to be studied in the expanded
facility, the deadliest of which is the Ebola virus. Friends of the Bitterroot
member Jim Olsen called the malfunction "another example of stuff
not working like it's supposed to" at the lab. Rocky Mountain Laboratory
Associate Director Marshall Bloom notes that that response comes from a
group known to oppose the lab's expansion. More reasonable people, Bloom
says, "have been impressed with how rapidly and completely Rocky Mountain
Labs evaluated the situation' made the necessary modifications in procedure
and notified all segments of the community," Bloom said. That's reassuring:
When Ebola escapes in the night, Hamiltonians can sleep soundly knowing
they,ll be notified first thing in the morning.
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- Army Releases Fort Detrick Researcher Exposed To Ebol
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/health/2894885/detail.html
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- POSTED: 4:58 pm EST March 3, 2004
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- The Army released a Fort Detrick researcher from quarantine
Wednesday. She's the woman who accidentally stuck herself with a hypodermic
needle containing the Ebola virus. last month. The scientist was exposed
to a weakened strain of the Ebola virus Feb.11. She was put into quarantinethe
next day.
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- The Army told11 News that she showed no symptoms of the
disease during her 21-day stay at the Medical Research Institutes Biosafety
Containment Unit.
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- MotherJones.com The Next Worst Thing Is the federal government's
expansion of biodefense research paving the way for the bioweapons of the
future?
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- Michael Scherer March/April 2004 Issue
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- It has been called a modern-day Manhattan Project"a
spending spree so vast and rapid that it might change the face of biological
science. In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government is funding a massive
new biodefense research effort, redirecting up to $10 billion toward projects
related to biological weapons such as anthrax. The Pentagon's budget for
chemical and biological defense has doubled; high-security nuclear-weapons
labs have begun conducting genetic research on dangerous pathogens; universities
are receiving government funding to build high-tech labs equipped to handle
deadly infectious organisms; and Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the home
of America's secret bioweapons program, is about to break ground on two
new high-tech biodefense centers.
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- Officials say the effort is designed to head off what
a recent CIA report calls the "darker bioweapons future." Intelligence
briefings are awash with speculation about other nations or terrorists
developing genetically engineered pathogens "worse than any disease
known to man." But a growing number of microbiologists, nonproliferation
experts, and former government officials say there may be a dark side to
the biodefense push: With poor oversight, government-funded scientists
could actually be paving the way for the next generation of killer germs"and
given the explosion of research, there is no way to keep track of what
is being done. "We are playing games with fire," says Ken Alibek,
a top scientist in the Soviet Union's bioweapons program until defecting
to the United States. "It is kind of a Pandora's box. As soon as you
open it, there is no way of putting it back in." In a little-noticed
report released in October, the National Academy of Sciences warned that
the government has no mechanism to prevent the "misuse of the tools,
technology, or knowledge base of this research enterprise for offensive
military or terrorist purposes." The report called for dramatically
stepped-up monitoring of federally supported biodefense projects; so far,
Congress and the administration have failed to act on those recommendations.
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- Federal anti-terror legislation has focused on limiting
access to stockpiles of known bioterrorism agents such as anthrax. But
in a world where scientists can create deadly diseases in a test tube,
says Dr. Ernie Takafuji, acting assistant director of biodefense at the
National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, that is not enough.
"When you come down to it, the threat is not just the organisms,"
he explains. "The threat is the technologies." The greatest danger,
scientists and intelligence officials agree, stems from researchers, increasing
ability to alter the genetic codes of viruses and bacteria: The same information
can be used either to treat disease or to make new germs" pathogens
that could, for example, be designed to evade treatment or to genetically
target specific populations. Late last year, for example, Takafuji and
other public-health officials were caught by surprise when an American
virologist, Mark Buller, revealed that he was working on ways of creating
a more deadly form of mousepox, a relative of smallpox, and was considering
similar work on cowpox, which can infect humans. No one suggested that
Buller, who has been working at St. Louis University to defeat known techniques
for making pox viruses more lethal, sought to create a bioweapon.
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- But the prospect of manufacturing a more deadly germ
just to see how it could be killed worried many. "That is work that
creates a new vulnerability for the United States and the world,"
says Richard H. Ebright, lab director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology
at Rutgers University. "It's like the National Institutes of Health
was funding a research and development arm of Al Qaeda." Buller himself,
while defending the benefits of his own work, acknowledges the concerns
over the new rush to biodefense research. "When you have thrown a
lot of money at it," he said, "people start to think very hard
about what is possible, losing sight of what is practical." In another
project that has raised eyebrows among bioweapons experts, a U.S. Army
medical scientist in Maryland has been seeking to bring back to life key
parts of the 1918 Spanish flu' a lethal influenza virus that killed 40
million people worldwide. While such research could be immensely valuable
in fighting another deadly flu outbreak, it might also be used to create
such an outbreak, notes Ed Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, a
group critical of American biodefense spending. "If [the researcher]
worked in a Chinese, Russian' or Iranian laboratory," he says, "his
work might well be seen as the smoking gun' of a bio-warfare program."
Even more worrisome to many experts is the apparent growth in secretive,
or "black box," biodefense research by the U.S. intelligence
community.
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- "There's all kinds of secret research going on right
now," says Matthew Meselson' a Harvard biologist who has worked closely
with the military. "The more you create secret research in biology,"
he warns, "the more you create risk." One program that has become
public is Project Jefferson' a Pentagon effort to genetically engineer
a vaccine-resistant version of anthrax. After the program's existence was
revealed by the New York Times in 2001, the Pentagon announced that it
intended to complete the project and that the results would be classified.
"[The military's] natural instinct is to exploit the technology and
keep everybody else away from it," says John D. Steinbruner, director
of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University
of Maryland. "In their hands, this technology is potentially extremely
dangerous." Programs like Project Jefferson have already raised concerns
that U.S. scientists are treading dangerously close to the limits of the
1972 Biological Weapons Convention' which prohibits offensive research.
Just months before September 11, the Bush administration walked away from
negotiations to impose biological-weapons inspections, in part because
American pharmaceutical companies did not want to open their labs to international
inspectors.
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- The abandonment of the talks left the world without any
way to enforce the treaty's restrictions. Now, experts fear that the explosion
of American research"including programs such as Project Jefferson
that are widely viewed as potential violations of the treaty"might
encourage other countries to disregard the convention. Despite these fears,
the administration is pushing to expand research programs even further.
In a rare unclassified report on the Pentagon's biodefense plans, James
B. Petro, a top official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently called
for a new federal "threat assessment" facility for advanced bioweapons.
Such a facility, he wrote, would investigate topics with "limited
implications for the general bioscience community, but significant application
for nefarious scientists." To many observers, the statement indicated
that the United States is moving toward a pre-emptive approach, attempting
to beat terrorists to the punch by being the first to produce novel pathogens.
"What they seem to be saying to me is that we are actually in a defensive/offensive
arms race," says Malcolm Dando, a British bioweapons expert at Bradford
University. "If the U.S. goes down these roads, it indicates routes
that people can follow."
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- Experts Question Safety Statement in Biodefense Lab's
PR Flyer
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- By Adam Smith http://www.aaca-boston.org/SampanWeb/ehtml/2004/0220/biostatement.htm
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- Is a city hall and BU flyer about the proposed Boston
University biodefense laboratory misleading? According to several experts,
a statement in the flyer glosses over risks associated with pathogens that
would be studied at the lab. The flyer was distributed at a December 10
citywide forum on the biodefense laboratory, and contains the statement:
"The quantities of agents that will be tested are too small to pose
a risk to the local area - they are equivalent to 1/100 of an aspirin tablet."
That statement, which also appeared in a BU flyer at a meeting on February
17, was apparently included to calm fears about the top-level lab, which
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- would include research of the world's most highly hazardous
pathogens. A Boston University Medical Center researcher stood behind the
statement, calling it "absolutely true" during an interview.
However, others familiar with biodefense research recently questioned the
statement's accuracy, some even calling it "manipulative." "The
city of Boston should be ashamed of itself for making such a statement,"
said Dr. Victor W. Sidel of New York, who co-edited the book "Terrorism
and Public Health." "It makes absolutely no sense and is pure
propaganda. To compare [the quantities of agents] to a quantity of aspirin'
which they seem to be doing here, is absolute nonsense," said Sidel,
who is a professor of social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and
Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "It's impossible
ever to say that the risk is zero," said Sidel. He said he is concerned
that either a breach of containment of a pathogen or an infection of a
laboratory worker could pose a risk to people outside the proposed National
Biocontainment Laboratory, which will include Biosafety Level 3 and 4 laboratories.
Sidel noted that in 2000, a microbiologist working at the U.S. Army Medical
Research Institute for Infectious Diseases was infected with Burkholderia
mallei, which causes the horse disease, glanders, and is a bio-warfare
agent. Robert M. Gould, a pathologist based in San Francisco and the immediate
past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, called the statement
"a manipulative way to put out the information." "You don't
need a lot of organisms, because they are capable of multiplying,"
said Gould, who has written about biological weapons. Also responding to
the statement was Neil Levitt, a former researcher who had worked at a
military lab in Maryland for 17 years. Levitt called the statement "an
old PR ploy used to minimize the perceived risks to the community."
Depending on what pathogens are studied, said Levitt, there could be as
many as one billion virus particles per milliliter of material. "You
don't need a lot for an accidental release to occur," he said. Levitt
also questioned whether the total amount of agents studied in the
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- laboratory would be so small as "to equal 1/100th
of an aspirin tablet.¡¨ "They are going to have to produce
larger stocks of each type of agent to be studied from the original amounts
on hand for any meaningful research projects," said Levitt. Levitt
testified in front of the U.S. Senate in 1988 about the disappearance of
more than two liters of Chikungunya, a non-fatal viral disease, from the
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- Biosafety Level 3 lab where he was working. MIT microbiology
professor Jonathan King, who recently publicly opposed the proposed Boston
University Medical Center laboratory, said that the statement in the flyer
"deeply misrepresents the nature of these organisms. These amounts
physically don't take up much space." King said that one needs only
to be exposed to "microscopic amounts" to become infected and
then spread illness to others. Underscoring his concerns about the proposed
biodefense laboratory, King
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- mentioned a recent incident in which a Biosafety Level
4 researcher in Taiwan was unknowingly infected with SARS and traveled
to Singapore before seeking medical attention. The researcher is believed
to have contracted
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- SARS while studying it in the lab. But Jack Murphy, Boston
University Medical Center's associate director of molecular medicine, stood
behind the statement, calling it "absolutely true." Murphy said
the quantity of agents studied would be "vanishingly small."
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- Besides, he said, the agents would be stored in double-locked
containers
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- inside highly secured labs that would be sectioned off
from each other. "It's not as though these infectious agents would
be sitting around all the time," said Murphy. Additionally, said Murphy,
protocols would be in place in the case of a lab worker infection to prevent
the worker from spreading diseases to others. Boston University Medical
Center, which will receive funding from the federal government to build
the biodefense laboratory, maintains that high-tech safety features will
protect against any release at the lab. Listed on the flyer are the letterheads
of the Mayor's office, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Boston University
Medical Center, and the Boston Public Health Commission.
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- -- Mary Wulff Coalition for a Safe Lab P.O. Box 1803
Hamilton MT 59840 http://www.oiruco.com
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- Patricia A. Doyle, PhD Please visit my "Emerging
Diseases" message board at: http://www.clickitnews.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=emergingdiseases
Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa Go with God and in Good Health
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