Accidents at Germ Labs Have Occurred Worldwide
Nations such as Russia, South Africa and the U.S. have long conducted research into how to make deadly germs
even more deadly. And accidents at these research facilities have caused germs to escape, killing people and animals near the facilities.
For example, the Soviet research facility at Sverdlovsk conducted
anthrax research during the Cold War. They isolated the most potent
strain of anthrax culture and then dried it to produce a fine powder for
use as an aerosol. In 1979, an accident at the facility
released anthrax, killing 100.
The U.S. has had its share of accidents. USA Today
noted in August:
More
than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins
that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were
reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012, government reports obtained by USA TODAY show.
***
In two other incidents, animals were inadvertently infected with
contagious diseases that would have posed significant threats to
livestock industries if they had spread. One case involved the
infection of two animals with hog cholera, a dangerous virus eradicated
from the USA in 1978. In another incident, a cow in a disease-free herd
next to a research facility studying the bacteria that cause
brucellosis, became infected ....
The issue of lab safety and security has come under increased scrutiny by Congress in recent weeks after a series of high-profile lab blunders at prestigious government labs involving anthrax, bird flu and smallpox virus.
***
The new lab incident data indicate mishaps occur regularly at the more than 1,000 labs operated by 324 government, university and private organizations across the country ....
"More than 200 incidents of loss or release of bioweapons
agents from U.S. laboratories are reported each year. This works out to
more than four per week," said Richard Ebright, a biosafety
expert at Rutgers university in New Jersey, who testified before
Congress last month at a hearing about CDC's lab mistakes.
The only thing unusual about the CDC's recent anthrax and bird flu lab incidents, Ebright said, is that the public found out about them.
"The 2014 CDC anthrax event became known to the public only because the
number of persons requiring medical evaluation was too high to
conceal," he said.
CDC officials were unavailable for interviews and officials with the
select agent program declined to provide additional information. The
USDA said in a statement Friday that "all of the information is protected under the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002."
Such secrecy is a barrier to improving lab safety ....
Gronvall notes that even with redundant systems in high-security
labs, there have been lab incidents resulting in the spread of disease
to people and animals outside the labs.
She said a lab accident is considered by many scientists to
be the most likely source of the re-emergence in 1977 of an H1N1 flu
strain that had disappeared in 1957 because the genetic makeup of the strain hadn't changed as it should have over those decades. A 2009 article in the New England Journal of Medicine
noted the 1977 strain was so similar to the one that disappeared that
it suggests it had been "preserved" and that the re-emergence was
"probably an accidental release from a laboratory source."
***
In 2012, CDC staff published an article in the journal Applied Biosafety
on select agent theft, loss and releases from 2004 through 2010,
documenting 727 reported incidents, 11 lab-acquired infections and one loss of a specimen in transit among more than 3,400 approved shipments.
The article noted that the number of reports received by CDC likely underestimates the true number of suspected losses and releases.
Indeed, there have been many accidents involving germ research. For example, the New York Times
noted in 2005:
In
2002, the discovery of lethal anthrax outside a high-security
laboratory at the military's premier biodefense laboratory, the Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in
Maryland, led to sampling throughout the institute.
And the Los Angeles Times
reported in 1988:
The
Senate report noted that accidents have occurred in the handling of
potentially deadly biological material. Vials of biological warfare
agents have been misplaced or spilled, it said, employees have been
exposed to deadly toxins and a fire once broke out in the
high-containment laboratory of the Army's leading germ warfare facility
at Ft. Detrick, Md.
Researchers are creating some very dangerous bugs. The Frederick News
Post - an excellent local newspaper for the community surrounding the
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at
Fort Detrick -
reported in 2010 that the facility would eventually aerosolize Ebola:
Ludwig said researchers at the facility will likely start out working on vaccines for filoviruses such as Ebola and Marburg, as well as new anthrax vaccines.
***
The facility will have the capability to produce viruses in aerosolized
form that would simulate a potential biological attack on the test
animals. Ludwig said aerosol is the means of exposure researchers are
most concerned with given its implications to battlefield and homeland
defense.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist has
re-created the 1918 Spanish flu in the lab. The Guardian
noted in June:
In an article
published last month, [Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at
Harvard School of Public Health] argued that experiments like Kawaoka's
could unleash a catastrophic pandemic if a virus escaped or was intentionally released from a high-security laboratory.
***
Many of the groups that create dangerous viruses to understand their
workings are funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Lord
May [the former president of the Royal Society and one time chief
science adviser to the UK government] said he suspected the NIH
supported the work because officials there were "incompetent" and
believed the justifications that scientists told them. "This is work that shouldn't be done. It's as simple as that," he said.
***
The study identifies particular mutations that made the virus spread
so easily. But that is not much use for surveillance, said Lipsitch,
because there are scores of other mutations that could have the same
effect.
***
Simon Wain-Hobson,
a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said he feared that
governments and funding bodies would only take the risks seriously once
an accident had happened. "It's madness, folly. It
shows profound lack of respect for the collective decision-making
process we've always shown in fighting infections. If society, the
intelligent layperson, understood what was going on, they would say 'What the F are you doing?'"
Obama Now Claims that He's Shutting Down Domestic Germ Program
The New York Times
reported last week that President Obama is so concerned about these accidental releases that he's clamping down on germ research:
Prompted
by controversy over dangerous research and recent laboratory accidents,
the White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new
funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous.
It also encouraged
scientists involved in such research on the influenza, SARS and MERS
viruses to voluntarily pause their work while its risks were reassessed.
***
The
announcement, which was made by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the
Department of Health and Human Services,
did not say how long the moratorium would last. It said a “deliberative
process to assess the potential risks and benefits” would begin this
month and stretch at least into next year.
The move appeared to be a
sudden change of heart by the Obama administration, which
last month issued regulations
calling for more stringent federal oversight of such research and
requiring scientists and universities to disclose that their work might
be risky, rather than expecting federal agencies to notice.
***
The moratorium is only on research on influenza virus and the coronaviruses that cause SARS and MERS.
***
The debate over the wisdom of “gain of function” research
erupted in 2011
when the labs of Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University in the Netherlands,
and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
separately announced that they
had succeeded in making the lethal H5N1 avian flu easily transmissible between ferrets, which are a model for human susceptibility to flu.
The debate
heated up further this year when the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
admitted it had suffered laboratory accidents that exposed dozens of
workers to anthrax and shipped deadly avian flu virus to another federal
lab that had asked for a more benign flu strain.
***
The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
***
Many scientists were furious that such work had been permitted and even supported with American tax dollars.
But others argued that it was necessary to learn which genetic
mutations make viruses more dangerous. If those mutations began
appearing naturally as the viruses circulated in animals and people,
warnings could be issued and vaccines designed, they said.
***
Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University, argued that the
long history of accidental releases of infectious agents from research
labs made such work extremely risky and unwise to perform in the first
place.
Germs Abroad
The U.S. conducts germ research worldwide. As the Los Angeles Times
pointed out in the 1988 article:
The Army conducts or contracts for germ warfare work at 120 sites worldwide ....
The National Journal's Global Security Newswire
reported in 2011 that such sites include bioweapon germs such as Anthrax and Ebola in Africa:
The Obama administration has requested $260 million in fiscal 2012 funding to bolster protective measures at African research sites that house lethal disease agents, the Examiner reported on Sunday (see GSN, April 14).
The Defense Department funding would be used to safeguard against extremist infiltration facilities in Kenya, Uganda and elsewhere that hold potential biological-weapon agents such as anthrax, Ebola and Rift Valley fever.
The heads of germ research for the Russian and South African
governments both say that they intentionally created more lethal forms
of deadly germs such as Ebola.
Specifically, the former head of Russia's biological weapons program
told PBS:
In the 70s and beginning of 80s the Soviet Union started developing new biological weapons--Marburg infection biological weapon, Ebola infection biological weapon, Machupo infection, [or] Bolivian hemorrhagic biological weapon, and some others.
The head of South Africa's Apartheid-era biological weapons program also worked on weaponizing Ebola. The New Yorker
noted in 2011:
Dr. Wouter Basson, and the various apartheid-era clandestine weapons programs he oversaw as leader of Project Coast…
South Africans call him Dr. Death. He is regularly compared by the local press, never very persuasively, to Josef Mengele. . .
***
There were revelations of research into a race-specific bacterial
weapon; a project to find ways to sterilize the country’s black
population ....
***
Basson’s scientists were working with anthrax, cholera, salmonella,
botulinum, thallium, E. coli, ricin, organophosphates, necrotizing
fasciitis, hepatitis A, and H.I.V., as well as nerve gases (Sarin, VX)
and the Ebola, Marburg, and Rift Valley
hemorrhagic-fever viruses. They were producing crude toxins (and some
strange delivery systems) for use by the military and police, and they
were genetically engineering extremely dangerous new organisms—creating, that is, biological weapons.
And see
this.
Dr. Basson alleges that the UK and U.S. helped South Africa with its biowarfare research:
The U.S. has - in the past - intentionally deployed germ warfare abroad. For example, the Senate's Church Committee
found that the CIA decided to bump off the heads of Congo and Cuba using lethal germs. And the United States
sold anthrax to Saddam Hussein in 1985, for the express purpose of using it against Iran. (CIA files also prove that the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s
use of chemical weapons against Iran.)
Top Bioweapons Expert Speaks Out on Ebola
Washington's Blog spoke with one of America's leading experts on the dangers of research into deadly germs, Dr. Francis Boyle.
Dr. Boyle wrote the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989,
the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons
Convention.
Dr. Boyle served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International
(1988-1992), and is a professor of international law at the University
of Illinois, Champaign.
WASHINGTON'S BLOG: You said recently that
laboratories in West Africa run by the Centers for Disease Control and
Tulane University are doing bioweapons research. What documentary
evidence do you have of that?
You mentioned that a map produced by the CDC shows where the laboratories are located on the West Coast of Africa?
DR. FRANCIS BOYLE: Yes. They've got one in
Monrovia [the capital of Ebola-stricken Liberia] ... one in Kenema,
Sierra Leone [the third largest city in the Ebola-hotzone nation], which
was shut down this summer because the government there believed that it
was the Tulane vaccines which had set this whole thing off.
And then they have another one in Guinea, where the first case [of Ebola] was reported.
All of these are labs which do this offensive/defensive biowarfare work.
And Fort Detrick's USAMRIID [the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute
for Infectious Diseases] has also been over there. So it's clear what's
been going on there.
CDC has a long history of doing biowarfare work. I have them doing
biowarfare work for the Pentagon in Sierra Leone as early 1988.
WASHINGTON'S BLOG: And how do you know that? Have you seen official documents?
DR. FRANCIS BOYLE: An official government document: the Biological Defense Research Program, May 1988. I analyzed it in my book,
Biowarfare and Terrorism.
It's clear that [the U.S. bioweapons researchers] were using Liberia
to try to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention. And CDC - for
years - has been up to its eyeballs in biowarfare work.
They always try to justify the development of
offensive biological weapons by claiming it's being done for "
defensive" purposes. That's just a lie ... and it's always been a lie.
It's been the case on Ebola and just about every other biowarfare agent you can think of.
WASHINGTON'S BLOG: Does that type of research violate the Biological Weapons Convention?
DR. FRANCIS BOYLE: Well, of course! It also
violates the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act [which Boyle
drafted], which was passed unanimously by both houses of the United
States Congress and signed into law by President Bush, Senior.
That Act creates life in prison for this type of "Dr. Menegle" type work.
WASHINGTON'S BLOG: And Obama recently said
- as quoted in the New York Times article - that he's "curtailing" this
type of defensive research, or putting it on hold.
Do you believe him?
DR. FRANCIS BOYLE: That's the smoking gun,
right there. Read that article [the New York Times article quoted
above, which notes "a sudden change of heart by the Obama
administration" about labs creating ever-deadlier versions of germs
which are already lethal].
The reason they've stopped it is to cover themselves, I think,
because they know that this type of work was behind the outbreak of the
[Ebola] pandemic in West Africa.
But that's an admission right there,
de facto.
_ _ _
Dr. Boyle made it clear that he is
not suggesting - as some others are - that Ebola was
intentionally released into the African population. He says he has seen no evidence of intentional release. He's speaking about an
accidental release of germs from a biowarfare research lab.
He's convinced, in fact, that this Ebola epidemic in Africa started
with the release from a U.S. bioweapons lab in West Africa. One of the
reasons for his conviction that the outbreak started with the release
from a bioweapon lab is that this Ebola strain
seems to be much worse than those previously seen in the wild.
As Dr. Boyle told us:
It seems to me that [the Ebola epidemic in West Africa] has U.S. biowarfare programs written all over it.
