bioterrorism
revere | October 31, 2008The last time we looked at the high containment laboratory in Galveston, Texas, it was directly in the path of Hurricane Ike. Flooding from Ike devastated Galveston but it was a comparatively weak storm, Category 2 on the Sumner Simpson scale. Katrina was a Cat 4. The worst storms are the huge Category 5 affairs. So Galveston got off pretty well as far as storm intensity goes, although the water damage was catastrophic. To remind you, our post on that previous occasion was, "Why would any sane person put a Level 4 biodefense lab in Galveston?" It turns out that now that the storm has passed,…
revere | October 12, 2008I am still trying to retrieve my lower jaw from the floor, where it fell after reading this:
When Indonesia's health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed and called it "the nuttiest thing" he'd ever heard.
Yet deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism."
The reason:…
revere | September 13, 2008It's not like no one thought Galveston could ever be hit by a monster storm. The city was almost destroyed in The Great Storm of 1900 which struck on September 8 of that year and killed 6000 people. The Thomas Edison Company has historic film footage of the destruction. So it seems a bit odd (I understate) that the geniuses at the Department of Homeland Security and NIH decided that Galveston was a good place for one of the first two high containment biodefense laboratories to be built after 9/11 (the other is situated in a densely populated neighborhood in Boston, another sterling choice).…
revere | September 8, 2008With all that's going on we sometimes forget about all that went on, even all that went on recently. Like "solving" the anthrax attacks case. Fortunately the New York Times reporters on the case are still on the case. And so is Congress:
A month after the F.B.I. declared that an Army scientist was the anthrax killer, leading members of Congress are demanding more information about the seven-year investigation, saying they do not think the bureau has proved its case.
In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of…
revere | August 31, 2008The folks at ScienceDebate2008 pushed hard during the primaries to have the candidates address science policy. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum from Scienceblogs The Intersection were among the leaders in this movement. They didn't succeed in getting a debate then, but now with the field down to the finalists, they have received a response from Barack Obama to 14 questions culled from over 3400 submitted by the 38,000 signers of the ScienceDebate initiative (we were proud to be among them; they include nearly every major American science organization, the presidents of nearly every major…
revere | August 28, 2008Civilian scientists are still trying to get used to the hysterical nonsense around "biodefense" that the homeland security apparatchiks imposed as Act I. in their Security Theater, bullshit that included indicting an artist and a respected scientist for shipping a harmless bacterium (see here, here). Meanwhile the Army has claimed the only serious bioterror attack on US soil with actual biowarfare agents was done by one of their guys. Whether it was the guy they fingered or not we may never know, since he conveniently is dead, but whether he was or wasn't the claim has revealed they operate…
revere | August 12, 2008We've argued before that the US biodefense laboratory effort -- whose planning principle seems to be based on "more" -- was making us less safe, not more safe. Whatever else you say about the anthrax attacks, they are a perfect illustration of this. The weapon and the culprit(s) came directly from the US weapons labs. A case of blowback if there ever was one. But the Bush administration, undeterred, wants to keep building these facilities. The highest level of containment for working with the most dangerous agents for which there is no vaccine or cure (BSL4 labs) were four in number in 2002.…
revere | August 11, 2008Questions about the FBI's case against popping up like mushrooms after a rain. There are too many to address in just one post. Meryl Nass's site has cataloged a number of them and Glenn Greenwald's latest installment others. We've weighed in a couple of times (here and here) and now want to add some additional thoughts about the official version of how the alleged anthrax attacker, Dr. Bruce Ivins, died.
Dr. Ivins was found unconscious at his home and taken to a hospital, where he died three days later. We don't know if he ever regained consciousness. Let's assume he didn't. There was no…
revere | August 7, 2008The anthrax story just gets weirder and weirder. More than weird, some of it reeks. A circumstantial public case first via media leaks and now via a press conference by the Justice Department is being built against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist who reportedly committed suicide as federal prosecutors were closing in on him. Reporter Larissa Alexandrovna (at-Largely) has raised a number of significant questions about some of the sources, especially the supposed therapist Jean Duley who is the one who has accused Ivins of stalking her and alleging he was a homicidal maniac who had already…
revere | August 4, 2008The unfolding anthrax story may not unfold much because the government seems to be in a hurry to keep it folded. They claim -- not officially but through the news media -- to have found the nutjob who did it. He had opportunity, means and motive (he was a nutjob). Now he's dead and can't defend himself. Case closed. Maybe. But neither the news media nor the government who feeds them crapola have track records for credibility, so I'm not yet willing to lay this vicious homicide automatically on his grave. Yes, we are getting all sorts of leaked info but then we got a lot of leaked info when…
revere | July 14, 2008CDC has discovered a new way a bird can cause bird flu: its own incompetence:
A laboratory building that contains a deadly strain of avian flu and other germs is among four that lost power for more than an hour Friday when a backup generator system failed again at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Alison Young, Atlanta Journal Constitution)
The outage was due to a bird causing a Georgia Power transformer to fail.
As Tom Skinner, CDC spokesperson/flack points out, power outages happen and at a complex campus like CDC's they are unavoidable. Powered systems are not the only…
revere | July 12, 2008We've had occasion to discuss the boondoggle, Project Bioshield a number of times (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). Maybe I should have said, quite a number of times. REally, though, it's hardly worth mentioning. Via the Clinician's Biosecurity Briefing, this:
The Project BioShield Act, passed in 2004, gives HHS "authorities to expedite research, development, acquisition, and availability of priority medical countermeasures for public health emergencies caused by terrorist attacks." This Congressionally mandated report covers progress on the uses of those authorities for the…
revere | June 24, 2008The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) newspaper is the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) worst nightmare because it continually runs in depth stories about why CDC is the worst nightmare for scientists concerned with laboratory safety. CDC is the agency supposedly ensuring the public's safety from laboratories researching contagious disease causing organisms. They have their own research labs which they need for identification of unknown organisms or scientific work on agents of special importance. In the Bush years, this has often meant CDC has worked on biowarfare agents. One of those…
revere | June 1, 2008Republicans are supposed to be the tight fisted fiscal conservatives and Democrats the ones who think that problems can be solved by throwing federal money at it. In reality it is just the opposite, a triumph for Republican image makers but a disaster for the rest of us who have lived through a decade of Republican Congressional and then Bush administration profligacy, with nothing to show for it but a widening gap between the favored plutocrats and everyone else. One sees it everywhere, most spectacularly in the Iraq debacle, which has enriched Bush - Cheny cronies while wreaking violence on…
revere | April 24, 2008The art professor is finally cleared but a distinguished biologist was still punished by a ridiculous, mindless, cruel and utterly reckless use of raw power by the Bush administration:
A federal judge dismissed criminal indictments on Monday against an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who was charged four years ago with mail and wire fraud after receiving bacteria through the mail that he said he planned to use in his art projects.
Judge Richard J. Arcara of the U.S. District Court in Buffalo ruled that the indictment against the professor, Steven J. Kurtz, was "…
revere | December 12, 2007The dramatic infectious agents like MRSA, Ebola and bird flu get the headlines but there are a lot of others out there, some of them capable of being just as nasty. Consider the new variant of adenovirus serotype 14, for example:
Infectious-disease expert David N. Gilbert was making rounds at the Providence Portland Medical Center in Oregon in April when he realized that an unusual number of patients, including young, vigorous adults, were being hit by a frightening pneumonia.
"What was so striking was to see patients who were otherwise healthy be just devastated," Gilbert said. Within a day…
revere | October 29, 2007Bruce Schneier, the security guru at Wired's Danger Room blog, reminds us of something important:
It's not true that no one worries about terrorists attacking chemical plants, it's just that our politics seem to leave us unable to deal with the threat. (Wired)
The chemical security problem is as urgent as it is obvious. Chemical plants are potentially static weapons of mass destruction: large volumes of ammonia, chlorine, highly flammables like propane, large repositories of chlorinated organic solvents and chemical feedstocks like phosgene and more. It's not just targeting the facility for…
revere | October 16, 2007The US bioterrorism program has claimed another victim. Not from a lab accident. Not from an attack. But from a ridiculous and mindless application of regulations meant to protect us from malefactors but which have instead punished scientists who may (or may not) have made missteps in this new Alice-in-Wonderland that is the biodefense world. The latest tragedy involves A highly regarded geneticist, Robert Ferrell at the University of Pittsburgh, who has just pled guilty to failing to follow proper mailing procedures. The actual charge he pled guilty to was "mailing an injurious article",…
revere | October 5, 2007Someday people will look back on the period of terrorism hysteria with wonder, maybe even wry amusement. There are terrorists, to be sure. Some of them work for sovereign states and are part of their military or police. Some of them work for "non state" entities. Those are the ones governments like to call terrorists. Terminology is important, I guess. Governments and terrorists have several things in common. Both have the objective of terrorizing and frightening people as a matter of policy. That's why we call them terrorists. Governments add the extra fillip of frightening their own…
revere | October 3, 2007If you increase spending for research on the world's most dangerous microbes you might want to also increase your surveillance and safety oversight. Since 2001 NIH expenditirues for biodefense research have increase over 40 times. And oversight?
American laboratories handling the world's deadliest germs and toxins have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003, and the number is increasing steadily as more labs across the country are approved to do the work. No one died, and regulators said the public was never at risk during these incidents. But the documented…