Worksite NEWS
VOLUME 22 NUMBER 10 Canada’s premier occupational health, safety and environment E-Magazine
October 2014
BIO-LABS Lacking Scrutiny By Lakeland Simms Worksite News Service The mouse was out of the house long before the public became aware that the Ebola virus would became a global crisis. Scientists wearing space-suitlike protective gear searched for hours in May for a mouse — infected with a virus similar to Ebola — that had escaped inside Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, one of the federal government's highest-security research facilities, according to newly obtained incident reports that provide a window into the secretive world of bioterror lab accidents. During the same month at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, a lab worker suffered a cut while trying to round up escaped ferrets that had been infected with a deadly strain of avian influenza, records show. Four days later at Colorado State University's bioterrorism lab, a worker failed to ensure dangerous bacteria had been killed before shipping specimens — some of them still able to grow — to another lab where a worker unwittingly handled them without key protective gear. Nobody was sickened in the incidents and the mouse was caught the next day. Yet in the wake of serious lab mishaps with anthrax and bird flu at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that prompted an uproar and a Congressional hearing this summer, these additional incidents are further fueling bipartisan concern about lab safety. "As long as we keep having an ad hoc system of oversight in this country, we're going to keep seeing more and more incidents," said U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight subcommittee that held the hearing in July. Added subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy, R-Pa.: "These incidents underscore why the committee has been investigating the safety of high-containment labs." The CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture jointly run the Federal Select Agent Program that oversees government, university and private laboratories working with dangerous viruses, bacteria and toxins called "select agents" because they're deemed to pose serious threats to people and agriculture and could potentially be used as bioweapons. Most of these facilities are "high-containment" laboratories operating at biosafety levels 3 and 4, the highest levels. Each level has increasingly sophisticated safety equipment and protocols to protect researchers from infection and keep deadly pathogens from being released. The Government Accountability Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress, has warned for years that no single federal entity is responsible for oversight of highcontainment labs and there are no national standards for their design or operation. It isn't even known how many high-containment labs are in operation nationwide because those working with dangerous pathogens that aren't on the federal "select agent" list — such as
tuberculosis, MERS-CoV coronavirus and some potentially deadly bird flu strains — aren't required to register with the CDC-USDA program. Citing bioterrorism laws, the Federal Select Agent Program doesn't publicly release details about accidents occurring in regulated labs. More than 1,100 incidents involving select agents were reported by labs from 2008 through 2012 and more than half were serious enough workers received medical evaluation or treatment, US media reported in August after obtaining copies of the program's annual reports to Congress. The reports, however, don't name the labs and provide few details beyond tallies of incidents by type. The details of the May incidents were revealed in minutes of those labs' institutional biosafety committees and related reports obtained by Edward Hammond, former director of the Sunshine Project, an independent lab watchdog group that operated from 19992008, until it lost funding. Hammond said it's difficult for policymakers and the public to judge the safety of labs and weigh the risks and benefits of proliferating bioterror-related research projects without data on how often incidents occur and details about what happened. "We need to require reporting and for reporting to be public," said Hammond, now a researcher based in Austin. Since August, Hammond has been requesting minutes of recent biosafety committee meetings from about 100 labs across the country and is in the process of reviewing the records to identify incidents. Entities that receive funding for recombinant DNA research from the National Institutes of Health are required to make certain records available to the public, including biosafety committee minutes. Among the initial records Hammond has received and reviewed so far, he identified those at Colorado State, St. Jude and Rocky Mountain National Laboratories as among the most troubling.WSN