DISTURBING secrets have been lurking in several US biodefence labs. In the past few weeks alone, some major violations of biosafety law at Texas A&M University have come to light, with unreported lab-acquired infections and unauthorised staff handling biological weapons agents among the breaches. Meanwhile, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, researchers had been working with copies of the Ebola virus genome without adequate precautions.
These violations were not picked up by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which oversees all biodefence work carried out in US labs. They were uncovered by 鈥� a non-governmental group with a staff of two, including me. We work against biological weapons and focus our efforts in the US.
In 2001, President George W. Bush rejected a strengthened international . Yet soon afterwards, spooked by letters containing anthrax and (false) allegations against Iraq, Congress multiplied the US biodefence budget by 10 and set in motion . Today, the US has some 400 biodefence labs and more than 15,000 people who handle biological weapons agents or, to use their euphemism, 鈥渟elect agents鈥�.
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My colleague Jan van Aken and I decided to work towards part of what we hoped the strengthened treaty would have achieved. We establish what biodefence labs are up to not by taking their word for it, but by documenting it using public sources of information. For instance, rather than look at a given lab鈥檚 publications, we find out who is funding its work and what equipment it is buying.
Since 2001, we have filed more than 1000 requests in the US under laws such as the Freedom of Information Act. We ask for safety records, research protocols, funding proposals, committee minutes and more. It has not been easy. Requests are ignored, searches are perfunctory and incomplete, papers arrive blacked out to the point of being unintelligible, and agencies pick fights over search fees. There are a thousand little tricks to derail naive or inattentive requestors of open records.
Some replies have been scary, some amusing. Several times, recipients of our requests reported us to the FBI as possible terrorists. I found myself on the US Transportation Security Administration鈥檚 watch list of persons who threaten air travel. In some cases, staff told to black out references to biological weapons agents in their lab records clearly had no idea of the subject matter. They dutifully crossed out 鈥渁nthrax鈥� and 鈥減lague鈥�, leaving the species names Bacillus anthracis and Yersinia pestis for all to see.
鈥淥n several occasions we have been reported to the FBI as potential terrorists鈥�
Despite the spoilers, the documents we asked for have yielded important information. Although the CDC was saying all was well in the country鈥檚 biodefence labs, we found dozens of institutional biosafety committees (IBCs) 鈥� the local bulwarks designed to prevent biodefence research from becoming unsafe or veering into prohibited territory 鈥� to be derelict and dysfunctional. We showed that the University of Georgia鈥檚 IBC had not even met when it allowed the first experiments to resurrect 1918 influenza, or Spanish flu, to move forward with no safety review. If re-creating an extinct organism that killed up to 2 per cent of humanity isn鈥檛 worth a safety review, what is?
We hope the violations we have uncovered will demonstrate how important transparency is for safety, and help to fight back against the secrecy of the Bush administration. Texas A&M has been ordered by the CDC to stop all of its research with biological weapons agents and is facing fines that could run into millions of dollars. It has also been dropped from the running to host a new $450 million high-security lab. It鈥檚 too early to be sure, but the university鈥檚 predicament seems to be encouraging other labs to confess to their own accidents, which could benefit both lab safety and arms control.
The Sunshine Project will continue its freedom-of-information work, but the problems probably run deeper than we can uncover. Most states do not have public records laws as strong as those in Texas and Wisconsin, but privately funded institutions and universities are not bound by them anyway.
The CDC itself has been an impossible nut to crack. It refuses all requests for information about select agents. Just last week I received its reply to my request for a report of its investigation into Texas A&M. It said it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of such a report, which was ironic, since it had already surfaced and was on the Sunshine Project website.
This week Congress is turning an eye to the proliferation of US biodefence labs. I hope it will overhaul the dangerously muddled group of rules and agencies that each oversee bits and pieces of the biodefence programme. The US does not need 400 labs and 15,000 people working with bioweapons agents, but if this state of affairs must persist then it should at least be made safer and more accountable, both to the US public and to the international community.
