bioterrorism
revere | October 1, 2007George Mason University in Virginia is a good school. Slightly on the conservative side, politically, but with astute thinkers in economics, political science and many other fields, including molecular biology. It also has a National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases. It has just announced it will be building a high containment research lab "aimed at thrusting the university into the forefront of the nation's counter-bioterrorism efforts" (Examiner.com).
The lab, which is being built adjacent to George Mason's Prince William campus in Manassas, will house laboratories that are…
revere | September 30, 2007Bioterrorism defense dollars seem to be devoted mainly to procurement. This follows President Bush's prescription for how all Americans could defeat the terrorists after September 11: go shopping. Practicing what they preach, the federal government has gone on another buying spree for something we don't need: anthrax vaccine:
The federal government has awarded a $400 million contract to Emergent BioSolutions for another 18.75 million doses of anthrax vaccine, with a bonus to be paid if the company wins approval for extending the vaccine's shelf life.
The 3-year contract for BioThrax vaccine,…
revere | September 26, 2007The Department of Defense is not the only Bush agency with a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Apparently CDC has one too:
For three years, inspectors from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found warning signs in Texas A&M University's biodefense program ? everything from unauthorized lab workers with access to dangerous agents to problems with how pathogens were stored.
But the federal agency's annual inspections, obtained by The Dallas Morning News last week, failed to turn up cases of human illness and exposure to some of the world's most infectious diseases. The…
revere | September 20, 2007OJ Simpson is back in the news, following hard on the heels of other celebrities in legal entanglements: Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Martha Stewart, etc., etc. Yawn. Were they treated more harshly beacuse they were celebrities? Yawn. The other side of the coin, of course, is the privilege of the famous and powerful. We know they often get off when lesser mortals wouldn't. So what does that have to do with what we usually talk about here, public health, infectious disease, bird flu, research? This.
Yesterday we brought you the latest in an ongoing series of posts about accidents in…
revere | September 19, 2007Biodefense laboratories at Texas universities operated for years without a single reported incident of laboratory acquired infection or even exposure. That is absolutely true and it sounds reassuring and it is similar to biodefense laboratores elsewhere. Don't worry. Be happy. But when it comes to claims of safety in biodefense laboratories -- multiplying like mosquitoes after the Bush administration rained dollars on their terrorist obsession -- you need to parse the statements carefully: "without a single reported incident" doesn't mean there were no incidents. It means none were reported.…
revere | September 13, 2007Texas A&M's work on agents of interest to biodefense has its two month suspension continued by CDC because of persistent and extensive violation of safety rules (posts here, here, here, here and here).
The violations alleged by the CDC include the university's inability to account for at least three vials of microbes, which the CDC described as "missing." In addition, one researcher was working to develop antibiotic-resistant strains of a regulated bacterium even though he had not received the CDC's permission.
What's more, laboratory workers did not don proper laboratory clothing or face…
revere | August 16, 2007Either there are more lab accidents in biodefense laboratories or we are hearing about them more (see here, here, here, here, here.). Since there are always lab accident but there is a lot more "biodfense" laboratory work, it is probably both. I think we can look forward to the Bush administration solving this problem by declaring lab accidents in biodefense labs a state secret. That way we won't have to worry about hearing about them any more. But until that happens, we can look forward to more of stuff like this:
A graduate student at Jackson's University Medical Center had to be treated…
revere | August 10, 2007We've written a lot about US high containment laboratories for potential biowarfare agents and extremely dangerous pathogens for which there is no vaccine or cure. But the UK likes to build these labs, too. In fact they have five of them. Where? Nah, nah. The UK's Health and Safety Executive is not gonna tell you. The terrorists might find out, and I'm sure there's no way they could obtain that information -- unless of course, they read the UK's TimesOnLine, which says they "include the Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections at Colin-dale, northwest London, the Centre for Emergency…
revere | August 5, 2007I wrote the post on Texas A&M that appears below while sitting in an airport lounge, sans connection. In the car on the way home from the airport late last night I heard on the BBC World Service the following story, to which I found links provided by two kind readers upon being reconnected (hat tip PM and KR).
Consider this BBC story a preamble to the Texas A&M post that follow it:
The strain of foot-and-mouth disease found at a Surrey farm has been identified, [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)] has said.
The strain in infected cattle is identical to…
revere | August 4, 2007While you busy being scared by the Bush administration about phantom weapons of mass destruction, there are real WMDs and have been for many decades. We even know where they are (no, not north, west and south of Tikrit, as claimed by the cowardly Donald Rumsfeld). They are in the former Soviet Union. They made bioweapons. They had stockpiles. They even had a well-studied accident with anthrax from a weapons research facility that killed dozens of community residents when a fairly small amount was inadvertently vented in Sverdlovsk. But Putin's Russia is not a target in George Bush's "Global"…
revere | July 12, 2007Oh, good. We're going to have more high containment (BSL4) laboratories to handle the world's most dangerous organisms, the ones for which there is no cure and usually no vaccine. Also bioweapons agents like anthrax and smallpox. Lovely. Where? We don't know yet. The list of candidates was narrowed to five for $450 million in federal dollars for a national lab to replace the one in Plum Island, NY. The ones that didn't make it are all states with a poor science infrastructure. You know, states like California, Oklahoma, Maryland, Missouri, Wisconsin and Kentucky/Tennessee. The ones that did?…
revere | July 3, 2007A year may not seem like a long time, but everything's relative. For Texas A&M University a year was 51 weeks too long since they were required to report potential breaches of laboratory safety protections in the federally financed biodefense lab they ran within seven days. This "failure to communicate" happened twice, once when researchers got ill with brucellosis and almost at the same time when it was found other lab workers had become infected with Q fever (see our posts here and here). We know about this because of The Sunshine Project, a citizen watchdog group that discovered the…
revere | June 27, 2007Q-fever is an acute febrile disease which presents, as do so many infectious diseases, with "flu-like symptoms." It isn't cause by a flu virus, however, or any virus. It's caused by a bacterium, Coxiella burnetii. It is class B biowarfare agent, meant to cause debilitating illness amongst its targets. It rarely causes death, although it can, on occasion. It can also linger as a fairly serious chronic disease. You get it from exposure to infected livestock or dried materials from infected livestock. It doesn't take a lot of C. burnetii organisms to infect you. Typically the disease is seen in…
scientificactivist | August 4, 2006With a name like Ready.gov, the Department of Homeland Security's emergency preparedness website isn't particularly modest about its objectives. However, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) claims that the site isn't living up to its mission. Instead of just complaining about it, though, FAS has put its money where its mouth is: it made its own site, ReallyReady.org.
Here's the best part. Instead of spending millions of dollars and involving who knows how many people, ReallyReady.org was created by one FAS intern, Emily Hesaltine, as a summer project. Whoa.
Now, before I go on, I…
revere | July 6, 2006And I thought my prescription drugs were expensive. The US government has just announced it was exercising its option to buy 20,000 treatment courses of ABthrax (raxibacumab) from Human Genome Sciences. That's $8250 a pop. It will go into the Strategic National Stockpile.
This drug is for inhalational anthrax, a disease practically no one in the world ever gets. Its only use would be the consequence of a massive bioterrorism attack. It is a monoclonal antibody directed against the anthrax organism's protective antigen, the protein that grabs onto the cell and forms a channel allowing another…
scientificactivist | June 13, 2006Although Steinn Sigurdsson of Dynamics of Cats beat me to this one, I still thought I would chime in. The Guardian reports today that is was recently able to purchase a 78-nucleotide sequence of DNA based on the small pox genome and that it was able to get the supplier to mail it to a residential address. The article is alarmist and sensational, but it raises an issue that in general has probably not been given enough thought.
As The Guardian points out, it would be very difficult to reconstruct the 185,000-base pair genome of small pox from such small pieces of DNA, and the closest…