While the national biodefense-industrial complex relies on fictional apocalypses to justify radical proposals such as pediatric anthrax vaccine trials, real-world problems with far less sex appeal form the basis for actual threats. That they are of entirely domestic origin apparently lowers their priority to near zero. A new report from the General Accountability Office finds that there is “no one agency or group that knows the nation’s need for all U.S. high-containment laboratories, including the research priorities and the capacity,” and “no national standards for designing, constructing, commissioning, operating, and maintaining” these maximum security labs, where the most dangerous microbes are studied. In other words, there is neither a consensus on why they are built nor on how to build and run them.
After a similar finding in 2009, GAO investigators were snubbed by the President’s National Security Advisor, whose staff (NSS) “did not tell us of any action taken on the recommendations.” Officials at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where GAO was sent by NSS, were not even aware that the number of labs was rapidly rising. And nobody knows how many there are (“there is no reliable source of the total number of high-containment laboratories in the United States”), though GAO was able to count an increase from 1,362 in 2008 to 1,495 in 2010.
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GAO investigators are not known as loose cannons. It is worth quoting at length one of their findings to show their typically level-headed tone in the face of an alarming discovery: “In the absence of some fundamental criteria, each laboratory can be designed, constructed, and maintained according to local requirements. This will make it difficult to be able to assess and guarantee safety, as we noted in our 2009 report. For example, while investigating a power outage incident in its recently constructed BSL-4 [Biosafety Level 4, the highest security for dangerous microbes such as anthrax] laboratory, the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] later determined that, some time earlier, a critical grounding cable buried in the ground outside the building had been cut by construction workers digging at an adjacent site. The cutting of the grounding cable, which had hitherto gone unnoticed by CDC facility managers, compromised the electrical system of the facility that housed the BSL-4 laboratory. Given that grounding cables were cut, it is apparent that the building’s integrity as it related to adjacent construction was not adequately supervised. CDC officials stated in 2009 that standard procedures under local building codes did not require monitoring of the integrity of the new BSL-4 facility’s electrical grounding. This incident highlighted the risks inherent in relying on local building codes to ensure the safety of high-containment laboratories, as there are no building codes and testing procedures specifically for those laboratories.” While no biological agents were released to the environment, the potential was demonstrated by the
escape of foot-and-mouth disease virus from the Pirbright labs in England in 2007, due to long-term damage and leakage of the drainage system servicing the site. Apparently there had been a difference of opinion over who should maintain the drainage pipes.