Renewed worries about safety of biodefense research

Texas universities have won hundreds of millions of dollars in federal biodefense research grants since 9/11, but reports last week that Texas A&M University had failed to report the exposure of four lab workers to infectious diseases — which led to and the indefinite suspension Saturday of all the university’s research on “select agents” — has prompted renewed safety concerns. The Dallas Morning News’s Emily Ramshaw writes that lack of reporting or under-reporting are common. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which oversees cases of infections from deadly pathogens used in labs, has official records of only fifteen possible exposure incidents to the most dangerous agents nationwide since the beginning of 2006, none of which resulted in infection or illness.

Experts argue the research is as safe as it can be. Lab workers at the 350 facilities nationwide authorized by the CDC to handle select agents — everything from the Ebola virus to smallpox — are highly trained, and their lab work is closely regulated by the agency at specific checkpoints. In five of the cases reported to the CDC, researchers or lab workers who suspected they’d been exposed to a dangerous biological agent were given precautionary medical treatment, and none fell ill. The other 10 reports were of incidents in which exposure was possible but very unlikely, and no medical treatment was necessary.

Critics argue that infections and illness are much more commonthan the CDC knows — and that labs either do not report them or put researchers on precautionary antibiotics if there is a mere suspicion of exposure. In 2005, Boston University officials waited two weeks to notify health authorities that they believed three ill researchers had been exposed to the tularemia bacteria — all while vying for federal funds for one of the nation’s highest security labs. That year, three lab workers in a Seattle research center were infected with tuberculosis while studying a vaccine for the diseases.

As the federal government continues to ratchet up spending for biodefense research — and as more and more labs and researchers are authorized to handle infectious agents — cases of exposure and infection will inevitably increase, opponents of such research say. Over the past five years, the federal government has spent tens of billions of dollars on biodefense preparedness, money allocated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and DHS to fund lab construction and the nation’s most advanced bioterrorism trials.

The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, a federally sanctioned “Regional Center of Excellence” for bioterrorism research, is home to one of the country’s few bio-safety level 4 facilities. It has received about $350 million in federal grants since 2002 to construct labs and research the world’s most dangerous biological agents. The campus is one of two in the United States chosen by federal authorities to house a new national biocontainment laboratory.