"The Germs Next Door" (Idiots at the helm.)
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Subject: "The Germs Next Door"
Date: Mar 26, 2008 5:02 PM
(Idiots at the helm.)
http://www.counterpunch.org/cox03262008.html
March 26, 2008
A CounterPunch Special Report
Bidding War for Biowarfare Labs
The Germs Next Door
By STAN COX
What would it take to convince you that your town should play host to
the world's
most feared human and animal pathogens? Believe it or not, five states
are locked
in fierce competition over a proposed bioterror lab that would have
them doing just
that.
In 2002, the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was
given control
of Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York. Now DHS is seeking a
home in the
heartland for a National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) that
would take over
Plum Island's work, along with its potent microbial cultures. The fact
that
many diseases are now known to jump between humans and animals,
combined with this
decade's terror-fixation, has led the federal government to convert
the agricultural
problem of sick livestock into the national-security problem of
bioterrorism.
Do I hear a bid?
Lying off the east end of New York's Long Island, Plum Island (which
was under
the Department of Agriculture until 2002) is the only place in the
nation where
scientists have previously been allowed to handle the pathogens that
cause foot-and-mouth
disease, rinderpest, Rift Valley fever, African swine fever, and other
horrific
maladies that, if let loose on the mainland, could cause billions in
agricultural
losses and even threaten human populations.
NBAF will be a "biosafety level 4" (BL-4) facility, providing the
highest
degree of isolation for the world's most dangerous organisms (Plum
Island was
one notch down, at BL-3, because it was isolated by water). Locations
being eyed
as possible sites include the University of Georgia campus in Athens;
the campus
of Kansas State University in Manhattan; Flora, Mississippi, near the
capital city
of Jackson; a research farm 17 miles northeast of Duke University in
North Carolina;
and a former ranch near San Antonio, Texas.
There is cutthroat competition for the lab, with DHS being courted
with the kinds
of incentives that go to all big potential employers. The University
of Georgia
has offered 66 acres of prime real estate worth $15 million and $4.5
million in
road and utility improvements. The Kansas Senate approved the issue of
$164 million
in bonds to pay for land, roads, and security for NBAF. Now, DHS is
reportedly demanding
that the lab, wherever it is sited, have its own energy source, a
natural gas-fired
power plant. Governor Kathleen Sebelius immediately agreed to throw
that into the
Kansas bid.
A big bio-gamble
Every potential location for the bioterror facility lies close to
large human and
animal populations. In Manhattan, Kansas, for example, the lab would
be located
not only in an agricultural region, and not only in the nation's
second most
tornado-prone state, but also within hailing distance of a senior-
citizen home,
a student housing area, an affordable-housing complex, a student
recreation facility,
a football stadium, and a basketball arena.
Kansas State University biology professor Walter Dodd will be have the
new bioterror
lab a mile north of his workplace if his state wins the sweepstakes.
He says that
in the struggle over the lab, it's impossible to compare risks.
"There
has been no formal risk assessment of the BSL-4 facility that is
available to the
public. Likewise, knowing the risk from terrorists introducing new
pathogens is
difficult." Although, he says, "We need to do this type of research
because
we must control diseases if possible," he worries about the proposed
locations:
"Putting the facility near a city or agricultural production strips
one level
of protection away." Dodd has recommended putting the lab in a desert
or back
on Plum Island.
Last year, DHS held a series of public meetings at the five candidate
sites for
the lab, soliciting comment on environmental, health, safety, and
socioeconomic
issues. The Department compiled almost 4000 such comments, the
majority of them
apparently negative. Residents raised a host of alarms about
accidents, sabotage,
natural disasters, ecosystem damage, water contamination, human or
animal epidemics,
use of the lab for secret, sinister research, and the general
ineptitude of DHS.
The Department is working on its responses.
When the bioterror lab is awarded to one of the five contenders this
fall, residents
of the "winning" location will be asked to accept such vaguely defined
risks in good patriotic spirit, to protect the nation's cities, towns,
pastures,
and feedlots from a hypothetical terrorist attack. But the facility
will be run
by administrators drawn from the same pool as those who responded to
the only actual
bioterror attack in this country to date -- the anthrax mailings of
October, 2001
-- and who have made virtually no progress in solving them.
Furthermore, as I argued on the CounterPunch site in 2004, any
agroterrorists who
might want to see their mission accomplished in rural America need
only sit back
and watch. Agrocapitalism is already doing their work for them:
poisoning water
supplies, releasing antibiotic-resistant, highly pathogenic bacteria
into streams
and dust clouds, and contaminating our food supply.
Even bioterror alarmists admit that the increasing concentration of US
agriculture,
and its increasingly industrial infrastructure, are precisely what
make it more
vulnerable. The US Government's General Accounting Office acknowledged
in a
2005 report that
the highly concentrated breeding and rearing practices of our
livestock industry
make it a vulnerable target for terrorists because diseases could
spread rapidly
and be very difficult to contain. For example, between 80 and 90
percent of grain-fed
beef cattle production is concentrated in less than 5 percent of the
nation's
feedlots. Therefore, the deliberate introduction of a highly
contagious animal disease
in a single feedlot could have serious economic consequences.
The GAO didn't go on to discuss the damage that can be done by such a
highly
concentrated farming system even if terrorists never cast their shadow
onto the
churned soil of the American Plains. And now the federal government
plans to take
a laboratory that harbors some of the planet's most menacing animal
and human
germs and place it closer than ever to the cattle feedlots and
slaughterhouses of
Kansas or Texas, the hog-confinement facilities of North Carolina, or
the vast poultry
operations of the Deep South.
Critics charge that bioterror-lab boosters at the universities
contending for NBAF
have nothing but visions of fat grants dancing in their heads.
Vigorous opposition
in Columbia, Missouri and Madison, Wisconsin got those cities taken
off the list
of potential sites. Last spring, when Columbia was still in contention
for the lab,
Eddie Adelstein, an associate professor of pathology at the University
of Missouri
and the county's Interim Medical Examiner, wrote that his university
was
developing a corporate structure to allow us to furnish our own
income, ignore
the needs of the state and pay our top-level executives CEO wages...
To achieve
... financial independence, members of the local welcoming committee
for the proposed
research center are willing to risk the life of every man, women,
child, dog, cat,
horse, cow and chicken in our homeland... Yielding to their self-
imposed pressure
to become fiscally independent, these leaders in business and
education have and
are attempting to lure to Columbia a high-tech government facility
that belongs
in a safer place. The desires of economic growth have overridden all
aspects of
science and common sense. They would place this facility near homes,
schools and
nursing facilities... When accidents occur, we would provide
interesting but frightful
data as these organisms have a predilection for children, older adults
or just young
people.
Dismal track records
BSL-4 laboratory capacity in the US, its growth once tightly
restricted, is now
slated to increase tenfold in coming years. BSL-3 labs, already
numbering more than
600, will also proliferate. With a new lab in operating in Boston and
the proposed
NBAF together employing 900 people, and with hundreds more scientists
and staff
needed at other new facilities, shortages of employees highly trained
in biosafety
will become critical. A group of 19 experts convened in 2006 as a High
Containment
Biodefense Research Forum concluded that the influx of new bioterror
research workers
"will strain the current national capacity for biosafety training",
that
"many researchers will be working on potentially lethal organisms for
the first
time," and they "will not be accustomed to the risks of infection..."
Past infectious-agent mishaps have often been the result of human
error rather than
equipment or facility breakdown. In the Forum, there was great concern
that excessive
trust in technology would lead to accidents in the new labs. One
participant said,
"I fear that some of our researchers believe that the engineering
controls
will provide their safety. And yet . . . it's the procedural controls
and the
practices of biosafety within the laboratory that are most critical in
maintaining
good safety."
Government-run biodefense labs do not have a good record of keeping
germs contained.
The Animal Disease Center on Plum Island, separated from the mainland
by several
miles of water, was considered for many years to be a safe place to
handle exotic
pathogens. But as Michael Christopher Carroll related in his 2004 book
Lab 257:
The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory, Plum
Island
suffered a long string of potentially disastrous accidents, including
the escape
of the foot-and-mouth pathogen from containment areas in 1978.
That fiasco led to the slaughter of all livestock on the island.
Carroll's stomach-churning
account of the killing, dismemberment, and incineration of hundreds of
goats, sheep,
horses, and pigs -- nonstop through an entire bloody weekend --
provides a preview
of what might be necessary if pathogens escape from a heartland NBAF.
(And with
an urban lab, human quarantine could well follow.) Carroll added the
astonishing
revelation that researchers took the risk of saving 60 sheep from the
slaughter
during the "kill weekend", so that they could be inoculated in the
open
air with the Rift Valley fever virus -- a germ far more dangerous to
humans than
is foot-and-mouth.
Carroll relates how that incident was only one of many low points in
Plum Island's
dirty history. He even provides good circumstantial evidence, short of
proof, that
the pathogens causing Lyme disease and West Nile virus leaked out of
Plum Island
to become endemic on the US mainland.
In 2006, the Frederick, Maryland News-Post revealed that the US Army's
top biodefense
lab at nearby Fort Detrick had been plagued with germ escapes since
2001, when an
Army technician was exposed to anthrax spores that had somehow reached
her outside
the containment area. That prompted a search, and the highly
pathogenic Ames strain
of anthrax was found around an ultraviolet sterilization box, an
office, and an
employee changing room.
It's not hard to see how contamination might have occurred. An Army
safety specialist
testified that in one instance, "I went into a virology suite one day.
He (no
name specified) went through the hot change room stark naked carrying
two library
books and a bottle of Pepsi. I went in through the change room and
found him sitting
in the office drinking the Pepsi and wearing scrubs. I informed the
individual that
the Pepsi and the books from Frederick County Library should not have
come in through
the hot area..."
More anthrax spores turned up on the base in 2005, in an elevator and
hallway and
on a telephone. The News-Post found that the lab filed 161 biological-
defense mishap
reports just between 2002 and 2005. Accidents involved anthrax and
SARS, and lab
personnel have been infected with some pretty exotic germs: glanders,
Q fever, vaccinia,
Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and chikungunya. As an Army safety
officer told
the paper, "People can get complacent. Familiarity breeds
complacency."
In the words of another spokesperson, "People are people and there
will be
some degree of human error no matter where you work."
Texas A&M University lost its chance to host NBAF when it was hit with
a Centers
for Disease Control reprimand for unreported lab-safety foulups. The
letter cited
missing vials of infectious diseases and lab-worker exposure to the
pathogens that
cause brucellosis and Q-fever.
Finally, according to the Biodefense Research Forum, many past
mistakes and mishaps
in biosafety labs have never been reported, because those involved had
their funding
and reputations to protect.
Playing both defense and offense
The Agriculture Department, the US Army, and a university were running
the labs
that committed the blunders described above. If states competing to
host the NBAF
expect better performance from the Department of Homeland Security --
the outfit
that covered itself in shame with its handling of the Hurricane
Katrina disaster
-- they are probably asking too much.
All of the nation's bioweapons work is by definition "defensive",
but in the national-security realm, the mechanics of defensive and
offensive research
are often indistinguishable. Under both the Clinton and Bush
administrations, the
US has resisted any upgrading of the 1972 Biological Weapons
Convention by which
158 nations, including the US, agreed not to develop offensive
capacity. Since 2001,
US officials have moved forcefully to block any moves toward effective
inspection
protocols. A 2003 analysis by Nicole Deller and John Burroughs in
World Policy Journal
reported that "critics of the administration's policy speculate that
the
main reason for the opposition to the protocol may be that the United
States is
reluctant to open its biodefense program-which includes activities
kept secret for
years-to public scrutiny."
It's no secret why the government doesn't want public scrutiny: Its
"biodefense"
labs have stretched the definition of "defense" to include just about
anything. In 2001, exactly one week before the attacks of 9/11, the
New York Times'
Judith Miller and two colleagues revealed that Pentagon researchers
had developed
plans to breed an extra-virulent strain of the anthrax bacterium; had
built and
tested a "germ bomb"; and had built a bioweapons lab in the Nevada
desert
out of materials bought on the open market. (Unlike Miller's erroneous
reports
on nonconventional weapons in Iraq, this report was not debunked.) As
one senior
official told the reporters, the Pentagon "was pressing how far you go
before
you do something illegal or immoral.''
Given the thick curtain of secrecy that DHS will be allowed to draw
around the proposed
NBAF's laboratories, its research could well be pushed far beyond
those legal
and moral boundaries, and no one would be the wiser -- especially not
the people
who work or live in that unlucky neighborhood that finally wins the
germ jackpot.
Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book
Sick Planet:
Corporate Food and Medicine will be published by Pluto Press in April.
They can
be reached at: t.s...@cox.net.
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