'Germs, Viruses, and Secrets'

[babsbunny]

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/8/17/16342/9915/116/569406

by Plutonium Page
Sun Aug 17, 2008 at 04:14:01 PM PDT

One of the consequences of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent (but unrelated) anthrax attacks was a rapid increase in the number of high-containment biosafety/biodefense laboratories in the US. In October 2007, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing entitled "Germs, Viruses, and Secrets: The Silent Proliferation of Bio-Laboratories in the United States".

The Center For Disease Research And Policy at the University of Minnesota (CIDRAP) summarized the hearing:

A US House of Representatives committee today explored problems at the nation's biodefense labs, including a lack of coordinated federal oversight and even a lack of knowledge of how many high-containment labs exist.

These concerns have been highlighted recently by aggressive efforts from the Sunshine Project, a watchdog group that monitors biodefense research safety, and by other media reports.



Testifying on behalf of the GAO, Keith Rhodes, PhD, chief technologist for the Center for Technology and Engineering, said because a baseline of human error will always be present in laboratory settings, the level of safety risks will rise as the number of labs increases. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the number of BSL 4 labs has risen from 5 to 15, he said. The GAO estimated in its report that there are nearly 1,400 BSL 3 labs in the United States.

Of 12 agencies the GAO surveyed, none is responsible for tracking the number of BSL 3 and BSL 4 labs in the United States. "Consequently, no agency is responsible for determining the risks associated with the proliferation of these labs," the GAO report states.

To emphasize the importance of that last paragraph, I'm including a table from Rhodes' report (pdf) for the GAO (click to enlarge):

[Muttocracy]

1. sounds like a case of increasing risk. nt