2. Bioterror Research Adding to Risk

. Bioterror Research Adding to Risk

The boom in research funding that followed the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax mailings that came soon after has had unforeseen consequences — a spike in potentially dangerous laboratory accidents.

Before 2001, much biodefense research was carried out in government laboratories employing experienced researchers. But after the anthrax attacks that infected more than 20 people, killing five of them, biodefense work was spread to hundreds of university and research labs, which have sometimes been unprepared to safely deal with infectious microbes.

“Universities aren’t set up to handle these programs,” Edward Hammond, U.S. director of the Sunshine Project, which monitors biological weapons research, told the Los Angeles Times.
“I think we made a serious mistake putting 400 labs, thousands of people in the U.S., in the driver’s seat behind biological weapons.”

Biodefense funding is largely administered by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which has seen the research money it distributes soar from $187 million in 2002 to $1.6 billion in 2006.

Meanwhile, there have been 111 cases of potential loss of bioagents or human exposure since 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

No one has died due to exposure, although several have fallen seriously ill, and there have been no confirmed thefts or losses of bioagents, the Times reported.

But when the Government Accountability Office asked a dozen agencies if they kept track of all the labs handling dangerous germs or toxins, or knew the number, none said they did.

Ominously, Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright noted, “It only takes one incident in which a highly transmissible agent is introduced into a human population to produce a catastrophic loss.”

Hammond added: “The explosion of biodefense programs is creating dangers