Growing number of biosafety labs raises public health concern
Since the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people and raised the specter of bioterrorism in the United States, the number of high-level biosafety labs operated by governments, universities and others to study potentially lethal pathogens has been expanding rapidly. According to a 2013 report to Congress, the number of these labs grew by almost 10 percent, from 1,362 to 1,495, between 2008 and 2010 alone.
The construction of hundreds of new labs designed for working with dangerous organisms has occurred without any central oversight or clear strategy for expansion, congressional analysts and others say. The expansion has raised concerns that many of these labs may not be needed and that their sheer number raises the risk of exposure to the public from the germs they study.
The FBI’s chief suspect in the 2001 attack, who committed suicide in 2008 before he could be charged in the case, was a biologist at the Army’s biodefense lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Despite the concerns, Los Alamos National Laboratory is pushing forward a 2001 plan to build labs to work with disease germs like anthrax and tuberculosis, even though Los Alamos has not adequately explained what the facility would be used for or why it is needed, according to a report released last week by Department of Energy Inspector General Gregory Friedman.
Friedman wrote that the $9.5 million proposal had been made without fully assessing the need for and cost effectiveness of the project, and that the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs Los Alamos and other energy labs, “needs to fully reassess its need for biological research facilities.”
Friedman’s criticism comes just a month after officials at the Food and Drug Administration in Bethesda found 12 boxes containing vials of smallpox, dengue fever and influenza viruses — among other potentially deadly disease agents — squirreled away in cold storage.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
