Biolab Creations, Mishaps, and News

[Kammy]

CDC Shuts Down Bioweapons Lab After Infections (Updated) | Danger Room | Wired.com

CDC Shuts Down Bioweapons Lab After Infections (Updated)

* By Noah Shachtman Email Author
* July 3, 2007 |
* 9:24 am |
* Categories: Weapons and Ammo

"The Centers for Disease Control has suspended bioweapons research at Texas A&M University, after the school failed to report four workers’ exposure to biological agents. It’s the first time the CDC has ever forced a research facility to stop work on so-called "select agents." Five labs and more than 120 lab researchers’ efforts have been halted, pending a CDC investigation.

Three researchers tested positive for exposure to the weapons agent
Q fever in April 2006, two months after another researcher fell ill from contact with the another agent, Brucella, according to documents obtained by an Austin-based bioweapons watchdog group.

University officials waited one year to report the Brucella case to the Centers for Disease Control. The Q fever case still has not been reported.

Federal law requires quick reporting of incidents.

In a 2005 study, 97 percent of the folks receiving National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases grants for biodefense research hadn’t touched the bugs before 9/11. Hammond and other argues that inexperience is the Texas A&M flap is only the latest in a series of serious incidents at biolabs across the country in which people have become accidentally infected — or agent-packed animals have escaped."

[Kritters]

hmmmm

"accidentally infected....or animals have accidentally escaped." What a crock of ****.

we are supposed to believe these people have the intelligence of experimenting and researching with animals and organisms, yet not be capable of securing them?

Do they think we are daft? Better yet....they must realize so many people out there are clueless.

We are not.

Brucella ay?

[Kammy]

Yeah Kritts, exactly! Let's look at Q-Fever a second?

Q Fever

Q fever is a zoonosis with a worldwide distribution with the exception of New Zealand. The disease is caused by Coxiella burnetii, a strictly intracellular, gram-negative bacterium. Many species of mammals, birds, and ticks are reservoirs of C. burnetii in nature. C. burnetii infection is most often latent in animals, with persistent shedding of bacteria into the environment.

However, in females intermittent high-level shedding occurs at the time of parturition, with millions of bacteria being released per gram of placenta. Humans are usually infected by contaminated aerosols from domestic animals, particularly after contact with parturient females and their birth products. Although often asymptomatic, Q fever may manifest in humans as an acute disease (mainly as a self-limited febrile illness, pneumonia, or hepatitis) or as a chronic disease (mainly endocarditis), especially in patients with previous valvulopathy and to a lesser extent in immunocompromised hosts and in pregnant women. Specific diagnosis of Q fever remains based upon serology.

Contact with animals or ingestion of unpasteurized milk or fresh cheese was recorded for 35.4% of the patients. Most patients presented with fever (91.7%) and respiratory symptoms (88.5%), whereas hepatitis was present in 52%. Interestingly, 11 patients (11.5%) presented with neurological symptoms and 2 (2.1%) had cutaneous rash."

Biochemical stratagem for obligate parasitism of e...[Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1981] - PubMed Result

"Coxiella burnetti, the etiologic agent of Q fever, is an oligate intracellular parasite of eukaryotes. Unlike the majority of successful bacterial parasites, which escape the bactericidal environment of the phagolysosome by various means, C. burnetii multiplies only in the phagolysosome."

Phagolysosome **These look familiar -

phagolysosome - Dogpile Images Search



**I've got a photo of this 'release of progeny'

[Kammy]

Noah Shachtman's site: BOSTON BIO-BOTCH: GET READY FOR MORE

"Boston was only the beginning. With so many biodefense labs being built across the country, you can expect to see more news like the weekend's revelation that three Boston University lab workers were infected with tularemia, or rabbit fever.

Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, the federal government has been pouring money into labs that research the deadliest of bioagents. "Currently there are four [maximum security] Biosafety Level 4 laboratories nationwide, with six more planned," the New York Times notes. "50 laboratories operate at Biosafety Level 3, sufficient to work with anthrax, and 19 more are planned at universities and government institutions, according to the Sunshine Project, a Texas group that is tracking the growth."

[Kammy]

The Sunshine Project

The Sunshine Project
News Release
31 October 2007

Fake Forms Populate Fraudulent University of Texas Biosafety Site
Fake Texas IBC Operates in Parallel to Secret Safety Committee

At a glance, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) looks like it has an open and functional safety program. But appearances can be deceiving.

Prominent on UTHSCSA's website, the Environmental Health and Safety Department (Error 404, The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio) offers a well-organized set of forms and policies, interspersed with fancy graphics flashing messages about a "cleaner world" and "hazard-free work environment". Survey forms seeking input on avoiding certain types of lab accidents can be found, suggesting an active and alert program.

"The electronic bells and whistles are like makeup on a pig," says Sunshine Project Director Edward Hammond, "because the outward appearance merely disguises the ugly fact that UTHSCSA's biosafety program doesn't work as advertised. The University doesn't even use its key accident and exposure reporting forms."

Even worse, UTHSCA has a secret (and previously undisclosed) Institutional Biosafety Committee that operates in parallel to the official one that it has registered with the National Institutes of Health. Says Hammond, "UTHSCSA's secret safety committee is dangerous and intolerable. It operates beyond federal oversight and UTHSCSA's attempts to keep it a complete secret are an insult to Texans and the public in general."

FAKE FORMS: The Sunshine Project requested all copies, since 2003, of two of UTHSCSA's most important accident reporting forms: the Contaminated Sharps Injury report forms, required for use when an employee is stuck by a nonsterile needle or other similar instrument, and the Employee Exposure Notification form, required for use when employees are suspected to have been otherwise exposed to infectious agents, for example, by an aerosol or a splashed liquid.

Remarkably, UTHSCSA replied that none of either form has been submitted in the almost five years (January 2003 - present) covered by the Sunshine Project request.

UTHSCSA's reply is striking because of sharps injuries are common and because the school is also heavily invested in work with research primates, or lab monkeys, who typically carry disease or are deliberately infected for research purposes.

Sure enough, in a related request and only after substantial pressure was brought to bear, UTHSCSA belatedly acknowledged 31 workman's compensation claims filed for on the job injuries in its research labs during the same time period.

Of these accidents, 30 out of 31 involved sharps and/or monkey bites, scratches or other exposures (e.g. to blood and other bodily fluids) to its employees.

Yet the key forms of UTHSCSA's exposure control program remain unused, meaning that the school isn't doing a proper job of identifying and addressing incidents.

SECRET COMMITTEE: What's more, while all of UTHSCSA's public information refers to a single Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), in response to persistent Texas Public Information Act requests, UTHSCSA has been forced to reveal that a second, secret IBC committee also exists. IT is now fighting to keep the records of its second committee under wraps, trying to avail itself of an exemption from disclosure designed for medical records, despite the fact that the IBC oversees research and has nothing to do with health care.

UTHSCSA claims that the open IBC handles NIH-funded rDNA research. On the other hand, it is unclear what the other committee does, because the forms for both, and UTHSCSA's legal filings before the Attorney General of Texas make no rational distinction between the two. In any event, under federal rules and policy UTHSCSA should not be running "official" and "ghost" IBCs in parallel.

The only clear line between the IBCs is that UTHSCSA considers the records of one to be subject to Texas Public Information Act while the records of the other, it argues, are entirely exempt from disclosure. So secret is the second IBC that UTHSCSA won't reveal what projects it is reviewing or what other institutions it is collaborating with, although there are several, according to UTHSCSA paperwork filed with the Attorney General seeking his approval for deny public release of its records.

The Sunshine Project will contest UTHSCSA's secret IBC at both the state and federal levels. This issue will be discussed further in future news releases. A ruling by the Texas Attorney General in UTHSCSA's petition to keep its committee secret is due in December.

WHY IT MATTERS: The US is in the midst of an enormous boom in research on biological weapons agents. At the same time, advances in biotechnology such as synthetic biology are opening up new possibilities for causing harm, deliberate or accidental. Again and again, US biodefense and other labs have insisted that they have safeguards in place to protect the public from both accidents and deliberate acts.

Frequently, IBCs figure prominently in this alleged safety net. Yet, upon closer examination, IBCs and biodefense lab safety and security programs in the United States have again and again turned out to be more smoke and mirrors than reality. They have also all too frequently resisted the transparency necessary to ensure safety and promote international confidence in the activities and goals of US research with biological weapons agents.

The Sunshine Project, among other expert organizations, has called upon the federal government to constrain the biodefense boom and to tighten federal oversight of laboratories. For more information on the big picture of lab expansion and oversight failures, please see the Sunshine Project's testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee of October 2007: http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte_mtgs/110-oi-hrg.100407.Hammond-testimony.pdf"

-ends-

[Kammy]

http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte...-testimony.pdf

Submitted to the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for the Hearing: Germs, Viruses, and Secrets: The Silent Proliferation of Bio-Laboratories in the United States, 4 October 2007.

PROLIFERATION OF LABORATORIES HANDLING BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS AGENTS

There has been a large and unsafe expansion of US laboratories handling biological weapons agents since 2002. This expansion poses significant risks to the public through accidents and incidents of domestic source criminality (bioterrorism). Inadequate transparency exacerbates risks to the public and threatens international confidence in the objectives and activities of this US research, damaging prospects of improving global biosecurity.

The unprecedented expansion of biological weapons agent research has been conducted without a national laboratory needs assessment and appears to far exceed that which is prudent and necessary for our national needs.

The Sunshine Project has tracked the proliferation of high containment laboratories since 2002.

The media and the public regularly ask me where the federal government publishes this
information. It does not. There is no comprehensive government source of information available on where these labs are and are being built. In fact, the Sunshine Project’s data on lab proliferation has been requested by government agencies for their use and frequently appears in the news media.

The incomplete list of new labs reflected in this data together constitute nearly 4 million gross
square feet of new facilities, about 90 acres of space. In perhaps a more recognizable measure,
this is the equivalent of 36 typical “big box” stores for the study of biological weapons and other
dangerous agents. Placed end to end with no space between, the row of stores would stretch 2 ¼ miles.1 These figures do not include many dozens of new and converted BSL-3 facilities at other public and private research institutions.

In the past 6 years, however, lab expansion under the Bush administration has gone far beyond
what is prudent and necessary, and without an adequate regulatory framework. According to the
most recent statements by the Centers for Disease Control, there are now approximately 400
facilities and 15,000 people in the United States handling biological weapons agents. Many of
these facilities are new and are staffed by scientists and others with little to no prior experience
with biological weapons agents and the safety and security measures they require. In addition
they are frequently on college campuses and other locations where rule-based systems of strict
accountability are absent and, in fact, alien to institutional culture.

Research with biological weapons agents must be transparent and publicly accountable. A
culture of transparency does not presently exist. Laboratories would be more likely to conduct
research in a prudent and safe manner with the public able to look over their shoulder. Access to
records such as research protocols, safety minutes, and accident reports will help ensure that
studies are conducted with public safety and security in mind and, most importantly, reassure
other countries of the peaceful intent and activities of the US biodefense program.

The result is that local IBC oversight could only be verified for all relevant federal grants in 2 out
of 100 cases (2%). This means it was impossible to fully correlate federal grants and IBC
reviews in 98% of the identified BSL-3 labs. In 11 cases (11%), IBCs reviewed most federal
grants requiring BSL-3 containment. The majority of respondents (55) had matches of less than
half their research (28 IBCs) or none at all (27 IBCs).

In this analysis, there were repeated instances of biological weapons agent research found in
minutes that could not be correlated with a federal grant. Such research involved a range of
organisms including anthrax, monkeypox, highly pathogenic avian influenza, plague, brucella,
melioidosis, eastern equine encephalitis, and others. Due to a lack of grant information and/or
inadequate minutes, in some other labs it was impossible to discern what research, if any, is
taking place.

ACCIDENTS AND OTHER INCIDENTS PROMPTED BY EXPANSION OF BIOLOGICAL
WEAPONS AGENT RESEARCH UNDER THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

Accidents and other safety and security problems have resulted from expansion of research
involving biological weapons agents. These include laboratory-acquired infections with
biological weapons agents, unauthorized persons handling biological weapons agents, failure to
account for stocks of biological weapons agents, and other problems.

It should be initially noted that the public’s right to know about lab accidents is largely ignored,
and information on them is very difficult to acquire. The Centers for Disease Control refuses all
FOIA requests for such information (see “Inadequate Transparency”) and the NIH Office of
Biotechnology Activities has not produced its data (see “Failure of NIH Oversight”), although
there is good reason to question its reliability, if NIH data exists (see “Failure of Institutional
Biosafety Committees”).

- At the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2005 and 2006, researchers handled genetic
copies of the entire Ebola virus (called “full length cDNAs”) at BSL-3, despite the fact that the
NIH Guidelines require handling at BSL-4 because the genetic constructs had not been rendered
irreversibly incapable of producing live virus. The University of Wisconsin at Madison
Institutional Biosafety Committee reviewed and approved this research despite federal
Guidelines to the contrary. The problem was not detected by NIH. In fact, NIH funded the
research."

[Kammy]

"- There is evidence that a situation similar to Wisconsin’s exists or existed at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, which also does not have appropriate labs for such research. Tulane officials refused a half dozen requests to clarify the research, again with Ebola cDNAs as well as constructs for Lassa fever virus, another BSL-4 hemorrhagic fever agent;

- At the University of Texas at Austin in April 2006, human error and equipment (centrifuge) malfunction combined in an incident in a BSL-3 lab handling potentially very dangerous genetically-engineered crosses between H5N1 “bird flu” and typical (H3N2) human influenza.

The researcher was placed on drugs, the lab shut down and decontaminated. The University did not report the incident to the federal government and has since produced conflicting accounts of what exactly happened;

- In mid-2003, a University of New Mexico (UNM) researcher was jabbed with an anthraxladen needle. The following year, another UNM researcher experienced a needle stick with an unidentified (redacted) pathogenic agent that had been genetically engineered;

- At the Medical University of Ohio, in late 2004 a researcher was infected with Valley Fever (Coccidioides immitis), a BSL-3 biological weapons agent. The following summer (2005), a serious lab accident occurred that resulted in exposure of one or more workers to an aerosol of the same agent;

- In mid-2005, a lab worker at the University of Chicago punctured his or her skin with an infected instrument bearing a BSL-3 biological weapons agent. It was likely a needle contaminated with either anthrax or plague bacteria;

- In October and November of 2005, the University of California at Berkeley received dozens of
samples of what it thought was a relatively harmless organism. In fact, the samples contained
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever bacteria, classified as a BSL-3 bioweapons agent because of its
potential for transmission by aerosol. As a result, the samples were handled without adequate
safety precautions until the mistake was discovered. Unlike nearby Oakland Children's Hospital,
which previously experienced a widely reported anthrax bacteria mixup, UC Berkeley never told
the community;

In addition to lab-acquired infections and exposures, other types of dangerous problems have
occurred, such as unauthorized research, equipment malfunction, and disregard for safety
protocols:

- In February 2005 at the University of Iowa, researchers performed genetic engineering
experiments with tularemia bacteria without permission. They included mixing genes from
tularemia species and introducing antibiotic resistance;

- In September 2004 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, lab workers at a BSL-3 facility
propped open doors of the lab and its anteroom, a major violation of safety procedures. An alarm
that should have sounded did not;

- In March 2005 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lab workers were exposed to
tuberculosis when the BSL-3 lab's exhaust fan failed. Due to deficiencies in the lab, a blower
continued to operate, pushing disease-laden air out of a safety cabinet and into the room. An
alarm, which would have warned of the problem, had been turned off. The lab had been
inspected and approved by the US Army one month earlier;

- In December 2005 at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New
York City, three lab workers were exposed (seroconverted) to the tuberculosis bacterium
following experiments in a BSL-3 lab. The experiments involved a Madison Aerosol Chamber,
the same device used in the February 2006 experiments that resulted in the Texas A&M brucella
case;

- In mid-2004, a steam valve from the biological waste treatment tanks failed at Building 41A on
the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The building houses BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs. Major
damage was caused, and the building was closed for repairs;

- In April 2007, a centrifuge problem exposed several lab workers at the University of Texas
Health Science Center in Houston to anthrax;

- Also in April 2007, three lab workers entered a laboratory studying tularemia at the University
of Texas at San Antonio to repair faulty air filters. The workers did not wear respiratory
protection and handled the filter equipment without gloves."

[Kammy]

"USDA also makes biodefense grants; but does not enforce its own biosafety regulations in doing so. Formerly, all recipients of USDA biotechnology research grants were required to sign and submit a Research Assurance Statement certifying that they would comply with the NIH Guidelines and, thus, form and operate a local IBC to review research.

FAILURE OF INSTITUTIONAL BIOSAFETY COMMITTEES

In addition to the oversight gaps among private sector and government labs, there is widespread failure by institutions with registered IBCs to actually operate committees that meet and attend to their duties. The Sunshine Project has been publicly documenting these failures since 2003,7 shortly after the NRC’s Fink Committee published its report Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism, which recommended that IBCs form the front line for the safety and security of research with biological weapons agents.

• The IBC of the University of Georgia is responsible for reviewing research at the USDA
Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, GA. SEPRL is where the first
experiments to bring back to life the major genes of 1918 influenza occurred. In 2003, the Sunshine Project asked the University for the minutes of its IBC review of these experiments. It transpired that no minutes existed because no IBC review was performed of the research, which involved creation of an extraordinarily dangerous and novel influenza strains. In fact, the University of Georgia does not appear to have ever held an IBC meeting until 23 March 2006, a few days after the Sunshine Project again asked for its minutes.

• The Rockefeller University in New York City is a major biomedical research institute. Asked for minutes of its IBC in 2004, the University refused to provide any records yet peremptorily demanded that the Sunshine Project state that it has “fully complied” with the request for minutes. Eventually, Rockefeller was forced to reveal that its IBC had met once in 2003, to review a single project (and nothing else). The most recent meeting before that was in 1998. In 2006, Rockefeller refused to reply to renewed requests for its IBC minutes.

• The Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR) in San Antonio, Texas, operates the county’s only private BSL-4 laboratory and it refuses to produce documentation of its IBC actually reviewing projects.

• Asked for its IBC minutes in 2004, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia could not produce minutes reflecting committee review of a single research project. Despite its huge research portfolio, at none of its meetings from 2001 to 2004 did the Emory IBC review biosafety of any project. Instead, Emory's IBC hears general presentations from staff about biological, chemical, and radiological safety.

• Utah State University states that its IBC approved at least 48 research protocols before the committee was ever organized. Utah State could not produce any minutes of meetings of its IBC, except those of an emergency meeting - its first ever - called after the Sunshine Project requested its IBC minutes.

• The Venter Institute, formerly known as The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, MD, has historically not had a functional IBC to review its research. (This is discussed in more detail in “Failure of NIH Oversight”.). Despite that fact, a Venter-led consortium studying synthetic biology risks recently suggested that IBCs could take the lead in review of synthetic biology experiments."

[Kammy]

Army Biolab’s Missing Vials May Never Be Found (Which, Oddly, Isn’t That Scary) | Danger Room | Wired.com

Army Biolab’s Missing Vials May Never Be Found (Which, Oddly, Isn’t That Scary)

# By Adam Rawnsley Email Author
# April 23, 2009

"Vials of a potentially harmful pathogen have gone missing at Fort Detrick, the Army’s main biodefense lab. But don’t freak out. The samples of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE) virus are relatively small. The Army has found “no evidence yet of criminal misconduct,” the Washington Post reports. And the virus usually causes only “a mild flulike illness” — although “brain inflammation and death” are possible, too. “It has potential for use as a biological weapon but is far less lethal than some other agents the lab works with.

That is to say, if someone were to get a quantity of VEE agent and some cooperative mosquitoes, it would lay up a number of people in the hospital, but the virus would not kill people as aerosolized anthrax would.

“We’ll probably never know exactly what happened,” one Army official tells the Post. “It could be the freezer malfunction. It could be they never existed.”"

[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