UNITED STATES: Washington boosts biowarfare research

April 23, 2003
Issue 

BY RIK WILSON

Even as the administration of US President George Bush was waging war with Iraq in order to "disarm" its regime of as-yet-discovered chemical and biological weapons, Washington continued to implement a US$6 billion-plus expansion of its biowarfare "defence" program. The program involves more than three dozen proposed new or upgraded secret laboratories ("hot zones") across the US.

Arms control experts and health and safety watchdog groups are deeply concerned that behind the wall of secrecy that these labs will operate, the Biological Weapons Convention will be violated, accidents will be covered up and neighbouring communities will not be informed of the danger in their midst.

In early February, a series of open letters were sent to proposed "biodefence" labs asking them to commit, in writing, to policies that prohibit all classified research and which ensure transparency of their operations.

A contender to receive federal "biodefence" funding is the University of California at Davis (UCD), which wants to build a biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory, the most secure type of facility, capable of handling dangerous agents such as the ebola virus. UCD's proposal has come under intense fire from community activists. UCD only consulted its neighbours in the final days before submitting its BSL4 proposal, when it sought a letter of support from the Davis City Council. Some BSL4 labs, including that proposed by UCD, deliberately infect animals with disease.

Davis citizens were understandably angry when the story broke on February 24 that a monkey had escaped from UCD's primate breeding facility, which rears animals for "biodefence" experiments. University officials hid the story for 10 days.

It took a whistleblower's leak to the local newspaper before UCD admitted that the security breach had taken place. UCD said the monkey was disease-free, but citizens asked the obvious question: Why did UCD keep the escape secret? Joshua English, a community activist in Davis, added: "How open will they be when that escaped monkey is infected with ebola?"

UCD's lack of transparency has put its application for federal "biodefence" dollars in deep jeopardy. While other laboratories have avoided UCD's catastrophic meltdown, some are committing the same errors. The New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Centre and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for example, believe that even the fact that they are seeking a new "biodefence" lab should remain a secret.

At the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, officials are quietly retreating from a pledge made in 2001 that their BSL4 facility will not conduct classified work and will be "wide open and above board". That standard, which UTMB used in public meetings and on its web site, has been downgraded to apply only to its "current plans". Future work, outside researchers granted access to its labs, and new laboratory spaces are under no such commitment to transparency.

One of UTMB's lead researchers formerly directed a Yale University lab where faulty equipment and inadequate safety measures resulted in a researcher being infected with Brazilian Haemorrhagic Fever (sabia virus). The infected scientist did not report the accident. The severity of the accident and the infection were not detected by lab management for several days, during which time the virus was released outside the containment zone. Sabia is usually spread by rodents and is not believed to be human-to-human transmissible, however, some closely related arenaviruses (a UTMB specialty) can be spread from person to person. The lab director left Yale shortly after the incident.

Edward Hammond, director of the anti-CW Sunshine Project, said he is concerned "about how the behaviour of UCD and UTMB will impact biological weapons control. The international system to prevent these weapons relies on transparency, on the ability of an informed public to judge the nature and intent of biodefence experiments. This seems to be an afterthought for these institutions."

The US Department of Energy's proposals to construct and operate biowarfare agent facilities inside its nuclear weapons labs poses an additional, very serious, threat to US compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention. Classified research on bioagents would be conducted inside classified nuclear weapons development centres — the antithesis of the openness.

[Based on an article issued by Citizens Education Project, Los Alamos Study Group, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Sunshine Project and Tri-Valley CAREs. Visit the Sunshine Project web site at < http://www.sunshine-A HREF="mailto:project.org"><project.org>.]

From Green Left Weekly, April 23, 2003.
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