A Biohazard Catastrophe; Terrorists Need Not Apply.

Whenever I feel like getting a heated conversation started at a local coffee shop, I throw out a simple question. I ask why fellow caffeinists think we haven’t had a major attack in our country since the World Trade disaster. I have yet to have someone state they believe it is because we have secured our borders or have such a tight system of security that it has become impossible to breach our shores.

Before leaving the usually rancorous banter, I always throw out a parting question to the group. I ask if they think that perhaps our enemies, seeing what we are doing, are allowing us to destroy ourselves and find no need to do anything but sit back and watch. It is only a question I ask, not a statement of fact, but it seems each day the news tells me it is a query worthy of being solicited.

Last week I wrote about biological laboratories in our country having serious problems with accidents and failures. The blog, titled “Mishaps Reported at U.S. Labs" is at the end of this column in my archives section.

I wrote in that blog how there was going to be a senate subcommittee hearing on allegations of carelessness and ineptness at our nation’s labs last week. What was testified at the hearings actually should be more cause for concern than the original complaints launched against the labs reported by the Associated Press.

At the hearings, a dozen federal agencies were asked to give the number of labs currently working with the deadliest of pathogens. Not one of them knew the answer. They all did say that the boom in approving labs to house deadly biohazards has far surpassed the feds abilities to monitor them at anything more than a cursory level.

Federal investigators told the committee that because of shortages of manpower, lab workers are not being screened properly. They also stated many workers were not trained properly and that labs in order to not lose funding or be subjected to scrutiny by the few inspectors the system has, often fail to report accidents. These failures could at worst mean we already have technicians in biohazard labs with ties to terrorist organizations. At best we very well could have people working with the deadliest germs who don’t know what they are doing. In a national way, this expansion of a new deadly germ industry without careful oversight is allowing us to pick our own poison.

The most incredible statement made at the hearings was the report that a California University Lab had failed to properly package a shipment of anthrax and that a small amount of the deadly toxin had been released in shipment. What happened to the lab? They were fined $450,000. The fine of course was paid from the money the feds give the lab to study anthrax. In this day and age if a person releases anthrax they will face life sentences at trial. Here in this case there wasn’t even anyone fired and no one faced prosecution. All that happened was the lab was placed under new management as if the university was managing a restaurant that served bad food. These actions appear to tell us our government seems to think a deadly disease, if released by us, isn’t as serious as if it was released by a terrorist.

These absurd bits of information and more were presented to the first committee to ever convene on biodefense laboratories and that in itself shows how little respect our government has for killer viruses.

Now in order to make these labs more palatable for print, they have been given the euphemism of biodefense labs. The labs supposedly are an industry born out of the 9-11 tragedy as the administration believes finding better cures for deadly diseases and toxins might be needed to help ward off a toxic terrorist plot. Before the World Towers attack, the budget for biodefense was $160 million a year but has now ballooned to $1.6 billion and moving up faster than the SARS virus can spread. The resultant festival of everyone who can wear a lab coat signing up to try their hands at deadly viruses has gone beyond all need or justification.

I respectfully submit, there only need to be a few, seriously secure and well funded germ study labs and the rest should go back to finding better household cleaners.

What the hearings have shown is that we have created a national grid of deadly germ labs across the country that are inadequate, inept and improperly supervised.

And so as we must concern ourselves over a national budgetary collapse, failed border security and energy costs escalating to deadly levels for the middle class, we must now add concerns over a failure of our government to take seriously over 100 reported accidents at labs working with deadly toxins and viruses.

I wonder if we need to worry about terrorists destroying us with deadly germs. Given time, will we do the job ourselves? I suppose, if we do, we will then have our second committee hearing to find out what happened. If we can gather enough individuals still alive to convene one that is.

Comment by Danny Davids^(13,494) (212 days 16 hours ago.)

Comment by Mike Fak^(18,246) (212 days 14 hours ago.)