CDC Special Pathogens Branch (SPB) lab tech
immerses pathogens in liquid nitrogen for
safe storage in BSL-4 facility.
Photo credit: James Gathany, CDC
In
CDC Cracks Down on Labs After Anthrax, Bird Flu Scares, Jonel Aleccia of
MSNBC reports that CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden is angry about the long series of failures to adhere to protocols, and incidents at our nation's most secure biosecuriy labs (BSL), and has announced a moratorium on all shipments from the two highest level of security called CDC BSL level 3 and 4 labs. The CDC has completely shut down two high security labs until the problems are addressed.
Recently live anthrax was mistakenly sent from a BSL level 3 lab to 2 without inactivating the virus, 6 vials smallpox were found in an unsecured former NIH lab, and a just yesterday, the CDC announced that one lab was contaminated with bird flue, H5N1 over a month ago and Frieden only learned about it 48 hours ago.
Taken together, the breaches raise “serious and troubling questions” about the nation’s culture of laboratory safety, he said. Two labs have been shut; it's not clear how many others affected. ... “Fundamentally, what they revealed was totally unacceptable behavior,” Frieden said. “These events should never have happened.”
Frieden appointed Dr. Micheal Bell to be the single director of lab safety and promised that any lab workers who violated lab procedures, or failed to report lapses will be disciplined.
The moves follow lapses in laboratory protocol revealed the past month, including exposure of more than 80 CDC scientists to live anthrax, discovery of lost vials containing what’s been determined to be live smallpox at a Food and Drug Administration laboratory — and a discovery, just this week, that a CDC laboratory accidentally contaminated low-risk bird flu samples with highly pathogenic samples of H5N1 bird flu, and sent it out to a government lab. ... Complicating matters, workers didn’t notify senior CDC officials promptly about the bird flu incident, which occurred in March and was confirmed in May.
In addition to the anthrax and H5N1 incidents, CDC officials said laboratory lapses had occurred on three other occasions in the past decade. That included another accidental release of live anthrax at the Bioterrorism Rapid Response and Advanced Technology, or BRRAT lab, in 2006, and that same year, the release of live botulinum toxins from another CDC lab. In 2009, another lab showed that a strain of Brucella bacteria was released.
Congress has scheduled hearings on Wednesday to question Dr. Frieden. I hope these hearings go beyond just reviewing the details of these incidents, or discipline of a few lab workers, and also delve into deeper policy questions about which highly dangerous pathogens, we keep and which should be destroyed. We need the highest level discussion of which pathogens are worth keeping, and which are not, and whether or not existing BSL-4 protocols are even sufficient to protect society from the highest risk contagions.
For example, in 1986 the World Health Organization recommended that the last two known sample of small pox kept by the US and Russian military be destroyed, as the potential benefits of keeping these samples are outweighed by the risks. The WHO rejected the argument we needed to save sample to produced vaccines, as vaccines could be produced from the live agents in the event of a deception, biological warfare attack and new outbreak. This WHO recommendation was rejected by both the U.S. and Russia.
Also, we've recently read that one scientist recreated the 1918 flu virus.
It's time for a top to bottom review of the pros and cons of keeping and creating these kinds of dangerous pathogens, and other potential biological warfare and terrorism agents.
Strong arguments exist for both the benefits and our ability to control these agent, in certain special cases, as well as for tighter restrictions. The public should hear these arguments and be entitled to fully participate in the formulation of our policy decisions governing this research and the creation of, and storage of these highly dangerous pathogens.
We must not continue to accept, and tacitly endorse, the precedent that due to "national security" concerns, the military, or experts should be able to make these crucial decisions for us, and perhaps only tell us some of what these decisions are.