[lit-ideas] From the What Were They THINKING dept...
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:42:57 -0600
I see this as something of an antidote to the Balance piece... there are
SO many things wrong here...
[image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/> [image: Printer
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October 29, 2008
Bio Lab in Galveston Raises Concerns By JAMES C. McKINLEY
JR<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/james_c_jr_mckinley/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
GALVESTON, Tex. — Much of the University of
Texas<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_texas/index.html?inline=nyt-org>medical
school on this island suffered flood damage during Hurricane
Ike<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms/hurricane_ike/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
except for one gleaming new building, a national biological defense
laboratory that will soon house some of the most deadly diseases in the
world.
How a laboratory where scientists plan to study viruses like Ebola and
Marburg ended up on a barrier island where
hurricanes<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>regularly
wreak havoc puzzles some environmentalists and community leaders.
"It's crazy, in my mind," said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer in
Houston. "I just find an amazing willingness among the people on the Texas
coast to accept risks that a lot of people in the country would not accept."
Officials at the laboratory and at the National Institutes of
Health<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_institutes_of_health/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
which along with the university is helping to pay for the $174 million
building, say it can withstand any storm the Atlantic hurls at it.
Built atop concrete pylons driven 120 feet into the ground, the seven-floor
laboratory was designed to stand up to 140-mile-an-hour winds. Its backup
generators and high-security laboratories are 30 feet above sea level.
"The entire island can wash away and this is still going to be here," Dr.
James W. LeDuc, the deputy director of the laboratory, said. "With Hurricane
Ike, we had no damage. The only evidence the hurricane occurred was water
that was blown under one of the doors and a puddle in the lobby."
The project enjoyed the strong support of three influential Texas
Republicans: President Bush, a former Texas governor; Senator Kay Bailey
Hutchison<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/kay_bailey_hutchison/index.html?inline=nyt-per>;
and the former House majority leader, Tom
DeLay<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/tom_delay/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
whose district includes part of Galveston County. Officials at the National
Institutes of Health, however, say the decision to put the lab here was
based purely on the merits. It is to open Nov. 11.
Dr. LeDuc acknowledged that hurricanes would disrupt research. Each time a
hurricane approaches the island, scientists will have to stop their
experiments and exterminate many of the viruses and bacteria they are
studying.
And Hurricane Ike did not provide the worst-case test the laboratory will
someday face, some critics say. Ike's 100-m.p.h. winds were on the low side
for a hurricane, yet it still flooded most of the island's buildings. The
university's teaching hospital, on the same campus as the lab, has been shut
down for more than a month.
"The University of Texas should consider locating its biohazards lab away
from Galveston Island and out of harm's way," Ken Kramer, director of the
Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra
Club<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/sierra_club/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
said. "As destructive as it was, Hurricane Ike was only a Category 2 storm.
A more powerful storm would pose an even greater threat of a biohazards
release."
The laboratory is one of two the Bush administration pushed after the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The second is being built at Boston University
Medical
Center<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/boston_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
where it met stiff community resistance.
Not so in Texas, where there was hardly a whimper of protest. For starters,
the University of Texas Medical Branch is one of the largest employers on
the island of 57,000 people.
In addition, the leaders of the medical school skillfully sold community
leaders and politicians on the high-tech safety measures at the lab and on
the economic boon to Galveston, an impoverished town in need of the 300 jobs
the laboratory would bring.
University leaders met twice a month with community leaders for several
years to dispel fears of pathogens escaping. Then they created a permanent
advisory committee of residents that included some of their critics.
The campaign to win over residents was effective. In 2004, the university
built a small laboratory and won federal approval to study extremely lethal
pathogens there. The smaller laboratory — named for Dr. Robert E. Shope, a
virus expert — helped persuade federal officials it was feasible to erect
the national laboratory next to it.
Nonetheless, some community members remain skeptical about the safety
measures.
"It is not a geographically good location, and the safety measures are only
as good as the people who work there," said Jackie Cole, a former City
Council member who now serves on a citizen's advisory board for the
laboratory.
Other environmentalists who might have fought the project were bogged down
in a battle against a liquid natural gas plant that was to be built in Texas
City, a refinery town across a narrow channel from the island.
"It kind of went under the radar," said Bob Stokes, who heads the Galveston
Bay Foundation, a group dedicated to cleaning up water pollution.
Dr. LeDuc and other scientists at the laboratory say it is almost impossible
for diseases to escape. The air pressure in the laboratories is kept lower
than in surrounding hallways. Even if the double doors into the laboratories
are opened accidentally, air rushes in, carrying pathogens up and away
through vents to special filters, which are periodically sterilized with
formaldehyde and then incinerated.
All the laboratory tables have hoods that suck contaminated air through the
vents to the filters, as do the rooms themselves. Liquid waste, feces and
urine go to tanks on the first floor, where it is heated to a temperature at
which nothing can survive before being put into the sewage system.
Other waste — carcasses of laboratory animals and disposable lab equipment —
is sterilized in autoclaves, giant steam-pressure cookers, before being
incinerated off site, Dr. LeDuc said.
When hurricanes threaten the island, researchers will shut down their
experiments at least 24 hours before landfall, decontaminate the labs and
then move the stocks of deadly pathogens into freezers on upper floors,
where they are kept at 70 below zero, Dr. Joan Nichols, an associate
director of research, said.
Even if the emergency power system were to fail, the freezers can keep the
samples of killer diseases dormant for about four days, she said.
The precautions are necessary. The laboratory will do research into some of
the nastiest diseases on the planet, among them Ebola, anthrax, tularemia,
West Nile virus, drug-resistant tuberculosis, bubonic plague, avian
influenza and typhus.
In the top-level secure laboratories, where deadly filoviruses like Ebola
are studied, the scientists work in pressurized spacesuits inside rooms with
airtight steel doors. Before leaving the secured area, they take a chemical
shower for eight minutes in their suits, then a conventional shower, Dr.
LeDuc said.
The university's bid for the laboratory benefited from friends in
Washington. Mr. DeLay, who resigned from Congress in 2006, pushed hard to
bring the project to his district, as did Mrs. Hutchison, who sits on the
Appropriations Committee.
On a visit to Galveston with Mr. Delay in 2005, Mr. Bush said: "This
hospital is going to be the Texas center for bioshield research, to help us
make sure that our country is well prepared as we engage in the war on
terror. No better place, by the way, to do substantial research than right
here at the University of Texas."
Galveston's medical school has long had a top-notch faculty in infectious
diseases; the school's proposal beat out bids from the University of
California, Davis, the University of
Illinois<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_illinois/index.html?inline=nyt-org>at
Chicago and the Wadsworth Center in Albany, among others.
Dr. Rona Hirschberg, a senior program officer at the National Institute of
Allergies and Infectious Diseases, an agency of the National Institutes of
Health, said politics played no role in the decision to build the lab here.
The threat of hurricanes was outweighed, she said, by the presence of some
of the best virologists in the country, she said.
"You could put it out in the middle of nowhere and it would be a safe,
secure facility," Dr. Hirschberg, a molecular biologist, said. "But the
research wouldn't get done."
[image: DCSIMG]
--
Julie Krueger
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