Biolab Creations, Mishaps, and News

[Kammy]

Biodefense Labs, Bad for Our Health | Danger Room | Wired.com

Biodefense Labs, Bad for Our Health

* By Noah Shachtman Email Author
* August 3, 2008

"In the meantime, we’ve seen biolab workers infected in Texas and Boston; disease-ridden mice escaped (twice), and a deadly flu strain accidentally shipped all over the country.

Today, The New York Times echoes what we’ve been saying. All it took was the suicide of Army biodefense scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins, a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. "Has the unprecedented boom in biodefense research made the country less secure by multiplying the places and people with access to dangerous germs?" the paper of record asks."

[Kammy]

Originally Posted by Kritters

Kam...

Firstly... those pics look like Sponge Bob LOL (adding a little levity to a very grave situation)

Secondly.....this is such a joke. and no one in power is aware of this stuff?

does the President of the US not have strong freaking internet connectivity?

xoKritts

LOL @ Kritts -

I don't know if he's on a phone line or uses smoke signals? I just stumbled into this topic today, I was totally clueless... and... I CAN'T BELIEVE what's happened!

SNAFU... as usual! I'm finding it all very interesting though...

Hey? You want to open up a biolab and get some Federal grant money... we don't even have to tell anyone what we're doing nor even write it down! lol

[Kammy]

Plague Mice Escape Newark Lab

Noah Shachtman's site: Plague Mice Escape Newark Lab

"Just when we we starting to breathe a sigh of relief, that nothing toxic appears to have escaped New Orleans' anthrax labs. Now comes word, from the Star-Ledger, that three mice "carrying deadly strains of plague" have disappeared from the biodefense lab at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, N.J.

Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist - "You have more security at a McDonald's than at some of these facilities," he said."

**Hmmm... this story (which supposedly happened twice) is missing parts when you click on the links...

[Kritters]

Originally Posted by Kammy

LOL @ Kritts -

I don't know if he's on a phone line or uses smoke signals? I just stumbled into this topic today, I was totally clueless... and... I CAN'T BELIEVE what's happened!

SNAFU... as usual! I'm finding it all very interesting though...

Hey? You want to open up a biolab and get some Federal grant money... we don't even have to tell anyone what we're doing nor even write it down! lol

YES!!!! LET'S DO A CHIPMUNK LAB!!! NO...I'VE A BETTER IDEA. WE'LL GET A GRANT TO FIND OUT IF THERE'S ANY CONNECTION BETWEEN CHIPMUNKS AND CHAMPAGNE AND DISEASE.

R U IN?????

[Kammy]

Time to Evacuate Northern California

* By Noah Shachtman Email Author
* July 26, 2007

Time to Evacuate Northern California | Danger Room | Wired.com

"The Lawrence Livermore lab, outside of San Francisco, already has a pretty iffy security record — barely-armed guards, affairs with Chinese agents, lost master keys, the works. So what is management doing to boost its security credentials? Just what you’d expect: Partnering with Texas A&M, the school recently slapped down by the feds for accidentally infecting its workers with bioweapons (and then covering it up). What could possibly go wrong?"

[Kammy]

Originally Posted by Kritters

YES!!!! LET'S DO A CHIPMUNK LAB!!! NO...I'VE A BETTER IDEA. WE'LL GET A GRANT TO FIND OUT IF THERE'S ANY CONNECTION BETWEEN CHIPMUNKS AND CHAMPAGNE AND DISEASE.

R U IN?????

I think the che de monk ran off with the missing mice?

Can we do red wine, instead?

[Kammy]

Noah Shachtman's site: BIGGER WORRIES THAN BIOCHEM

BIGGER WORRIES THAN BIOCHEM

"why is America spending billions to defend against on a large-scale biochem attack that'll almost certainly never come?

So it's no surprise that, since 1900, there have been only 40 recorded bio-attacks. Compare that to conventional terrorist strikes, the ones using guns and bs. There have been more than 650 of them worldwide -- just since the start of 2002, observes Gary Ackerman, with the Center for Nonprofileration Studies, in a soon-to-be-published article. What's more, "there has never been a single bioterrorist incident with more than 15 fatalities -- an all-too-common occurrence when terrorists use conventional weapons," he writes.

Despite this, the Department of Homeland Security's 2004 budget, signed into law last Wednesday, allocates nearly $900 million for "Project BioShield," an effort to prep vaccines and treatments for biological and other threats; $88 million for the "National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center," to protect people and crops from germ attacks; $38 million for air filters to catch pathogens; $84 million for the public health system, to treat biological and chemical-attack victims; the list goes on, just about endlessly. And it doesn't even begin to touch the $1.2 billion the Pentagon wants to spend next year on chem-bio detection, the $1.6-or-so billion from the National Institutes of Health, or the $600 million that President Bush wants to spend to keep looking for Saddam's unconventional stash.

THERE'S MORE: A number of people wrote in, expressing upset with this story. But JB -- a doctor -- was the most eloquent, by far. Here's what he had to say:

Your analysis and conclusions are probably correct, with regard to both chemical weapons and biotoxins such as botulinum.

But they are utterly and dangerously incorrect when applied to biological agents that can infect humans, reproduce and amplify themselves and then spread to other people. Then it is not a question of quantity or dispersion, but of creating an agent with the right incubation period, mode of transmission and lethality, and then introducing it into the target environment in the proper way.

All of which is, unfortunately, now easy.

You may have heard of the Australian mousepox experiments, the news of which made quite a stir in interested circles a year and a half ago or so. Researchers, in an effort to use mousepox virus (a normally mild, nonlethal murine infection) as a vector for a cytokine (IL-4) to induce inflammation in infected mice and suppress their reproduction, found that the insertion of the gene for that cytokine turned this little nothing disease into a fatal one, and that previously useful mousepox vaccine became fairly ineffective, to boot.

Note that mousepox is related to the virus that causes human smallpox, that you can buy the necessary materials mail order easy as you please, and that the technology for inserting a gene for this or something else into an existing viral genome is trivial, and could be done by any grad student in the subject with access to any reasonable university or industrial molecular bio/genetics lab.

This, of course, is just an example. You could just as well modify Ebola virus to extend its non-prostrating contagious period a little, so epidemics would spread instead of burning out, etc. etc.

The danger is acute. We are now in a period of time, which may last 10 years or so (no one knows), in which the ability to create such genetically modified killers is widespread, but the ability to identify, respond to, and neutralize them quickly enough to avert catastrophe, has not yet developed. And every day's news reminds us that the irrational evil that would not for a moment hesitate to use such a weapon continues to exist in the world.

By downplaying the need to use all available methods and strategies (including, of course, pre-emptive military action when necessary) to prevent this threat from killing millions of innocents is wrong."

[Kammy]

Biolab Breakdown Caused Cattle Outbreak (Updated) | Danger Room | Wired.com

Biolab Breakdown Caused Cattle Outbreak (Updated)

* By Jason Sigger Email Author
* August 8, 2007

"In the United Kingdom, fresh fears over a new outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease have steered investigators to point to an unusual source - a pair of government-run laboratories run by the Big Pharma company Merck & Co. You might remember the name "Merck" as one of the primary midwives of the U.S. biological warfare program in the early 1940s - but that’s just a coincidence, I’m sure. From the NY Times:

There is a “strong probability” that the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain was caused by viruses that escaped somehow from a pair of veterinary laboratories where vaccines are made, a government report said today."

[Kritters]

Tooooo much Kam.....

About that wine....

[Kammy]

Scientists block Ebola infection in cell-culture experiments

Welcome to Galveston National Laboratory | News | Items

"GALVESTON, Texas — Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered two biochemical pathways that the Ebola virus relies on to infect cells. Using substances that block the activation of those pathways, they’ve prevented Ebola infection in cell-culture experiments — potentially providing a critical early step in developing the first successful therapy for the deadly virus.

"The premise for this work is that the virus is essentially nothing without a cell," said Davey, lead author of a paper on the research appearing this month in the journal Drug Discovery Research. "It needs to rely on many cell proteins and factors for it to replicate. The idea is that if we can suppress the expression of those cell proteins for just a short time, we can then stop the disease in its tracks."

"With the real virus in the BSL4, we found that the PI3 kinase inhibitor dropped virus titers by 65 percent, and if we used drugs which block CAMK2 function, it was just killed — stopped dead," Davey said. "This is really, very, very interesting because this pathway has a lot of potential for future pharmaceutical exploitation."