Examining New York's Bioresearch Laboratory

Evangelion quotes from a NY Press story about Plum Island: "'Located just two miles off the tip of Long Island and six miles from the Connecticut coastline, Plum Island is home to a Bio-Safety Level 4 (BSL-4) research facility... During the fifth month of [an Engineer's] strike, a three-hour power outage renewed public interest in the island... Without power, the air filtration systems are inoperable. Without power, decontamination procedures break down. Without power, the seals in the pressurized airlock doors start to deflate. According to one report, workers were desperately sealing the doors with duct tape...'"

Comments

BSL-4 labs

[BWJones]

Ahhhh, long walk on the beach of Plum Island watching the birds. (all kidding aside, seriously, it is good bird watching there). But, it should be noted that Plum Island is only one of several BSL-4 labs around the country that are publicly acknowledged. Others are located at UC Davis (proposed back in 2000 at least), UTMB in Galviston Texas, One propsed for Boston University, there are two just outside Washington D.C., there is one in Atlanta at the CDC and one in San Antonio. I believe we also have a BSL-4 lab out at dugway proving grounds in Utah as well.

So, one should know that these facilities are the absolute best place to do research with the kinds of pathogens and chemicals and folks should not be scared at the mere presence of these facilities because of the work they do to help understand disease and potentially, biological weapons that may be used against us. However, we should know about their presence, and we should have contingency plans in place for the surrounding population (aside from "sanitation") should we have problems at these facilities.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

My father is managing the construction of a new BSL-4 lab in Iowa. The test procedure involves compressing the room to some ridiculous pressure and then making sure it holds it for 48 hours or so. That means every outlet, every electrical conduit, every pipe, etc. must be epoxy sealed. Apparently the CDC had a BSL-4 building that never passed the pressure tests. So all that money later and it just sits empty.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[demachina]

There are probably a wonderful thing when they are used to prevent epidemics and to develop countermeasures for biological attacks. Unfortunately there is always the chance that they are dual use, especially at places like Ft. Dietrick. If they are also being used to reengineer microorganisms to be more effective weapons then they aren't quite as noble as you paint them. The U.S. would like you to believe they stopped developement of bioweapons in 1969 but you would have to be an optimist to believe that is really the case since the U.S. consistently opposes any international effort to verify bioweapons labs are not being used for new weapons research.

Probably the most disturbing indictment of these facilities is that the Anthrax used in the attacks in the U.S. that followed 9/11 were traced back to the Ames strain of Anthrax which is American in origin and is used extensively at
USAMRID, Dugway, and Batelle among others. A full list is here:

http://www.fas.org/bwc/news/anthraxreport.htm

The Anthrax attacks which have largely faded in to obscurity, unsolved, should be a source of deep concern to American's and the world. They might have been perpetrated by a roque wacko that had access to Anthrax in one of these facilities. Its pretty unlikely they were perpetrated by an Arab terrorist. They could have just as easily been a covert operation perpetrated by a misguided government agency designed to stoke fear of WMD's in the U.S. Coincidentally the Bush administration, right after this used the threat of WMD's as the rationale to attack Iraq though no significant WMD programs have been found there. They will, no doubt, continue to use WMD's as a rationale for preemptive warfare assuming they can get away with it after the bold faced lie the war in Iraq has proven to be.

WMD's are the perfect rationale for preemptive warfare. You can accuse any country of developing them and its impossible for the target country to prove they don't. Every nation in the world has dual use industrial equipment that can be redirected to chemical and biological weapons production and the Bush administration cynically uses this fact to suggest a target country is a danger because they have tanks thats could be used to ferment biological weapons, for example.

As much as the U.S. likes to get on the high horse about WMD's its still a fact that the U.S. has more of them than anyone and has used them in the past to kill large numbers of innocent civilians by nuking two cities in Japan full of civilians in particular.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[canajin56]

Yes, and they are almost certain that this Anthrax came from Ft. Detrick, since that exact strain was used there, and some was missing. Additionally, one Lt. Col. Philip Zack was spotted by security cameras entering the facility after hours, and after he had been FIRED one year earlier for racially-motivated harassment against an Egyptian researched named Dr. Assaad. One day before the Anthrax attacks, the FBI was sent an anonymous letter warning that Dr. Assaad was a nutcase, and planning some sort of biological attack on the USA. They investigated him, but determined it was an attempt to frame him. But they NEVER investigated WHO was trying to frame him. Odds are it was the same person who initiated the attacks. (How else would he know?)

So what we have is somebody who was FIRED over his hatred of an Arab, who was spotted illegally entering a secure facility shortly before the Anthrax used in the attacks WENT MISSING, and they received a letter implicating this same Arab immediatly before the attacks began. Additionally, the letters sent with the anthrax were written so as to frame Arabs. However, forensic analysis revealed that the person who penned them writes in English, and was faking an Arabic "accent" on the penmanship (Or whatever it is called when your penmanship is affected by the script you first learned to write in) Also, the letters told the people to take antibiotics. Why would terrorists trying to kill somebody do all they can to help save them? A real terrorist wouldn't say it was Anthrax at all, let alone recommend a treatment. Some have said "Well penacillin wouldn't help, you need Cipero!" That is completely untrue. The people who make Cipero would like you to believe it is the only antibiotic that works, but it is not. There are many antibiotics that are effective. Penicillin is, and is FAR cheaper.

Re:Not so bad?

[TGK]

Because of the infection rates on some of those bugs. BSL4 is terrifying stuff, it's like working with plutonium that can breed.

If I remember correctly, to be a BSL4 pathogen a bug must have a high lethality in humans, unresponsive to treatment and vaccine, and a high infection rate.

Aids, for example, is BSL3 (or is it 2?). Now, HIV if frightening stuff, and while treatment has come a long way recently, its still the stuff of nightmares.

BSL4 is the stuff of the kind of nightmares you get after watching a Hannibal Lecter marathon while dropping acid.

Personaly I'd be much happier of BSL4 labs had some sort of fail safe, such that if all proverbial hell broke loose the doors would just shut and seal, and if everyone inside died horribly, well... so be it.

Labor issues have plagued the facility...

[terraformer]

...for years. My parents still live on Long Island and I take the Orient point ferry (docks 100 yards from the Long Island depo servicing Plum Island) and for years there has been one union or another on strike there. You see them every time you take the ferry. The scary thing is that plum island used to be isolated but there are more and more people moving to the North Fork and that ferry is seeing a huge amount of growth these days with the casinos opening up in CT. Any mishap could be disastrous and be totally uncontainable due to the sheer numbers of people every which way on the ferry services through that area. Also, the ferry comes within a half mile of the island on a regular basis. I would imagine that is enough to put the passengers at risk and if any leak is not found immediately then when the passengers dock at CT or Orient they could be off and running infecting everyone else before it can be stopped.

Re:Scary..

[Fnkmaster]

A more useful question is why on earth is striking allowed at this kind of facility? I mean, I appreciate the right to collective bargaining and unionization, but that right has certain bounds in facilities of national security importance like this.

I think the public's right to safety from level 4 biohazard's trumps the right of facilities engineers at this place to strike, any day. Whoever let such a situation occur in the first place should be held personally responsible for any injuries or deaths caused by inadequate, incompetent maintenance at this place.

Level 3 is closer than you think

[ka9dgx]

Any decent hospital Emergency Room deals with Level 2 all the time (sharps, blood, etc), and will see Level 3 on a fairly regular basis (Tuberculosis, Encephalitis, etc).

--Mike--

Ken Alibek(ov)

[Chitlenz]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385 334966/qid=1079632818/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/102-04375 66-8960154?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Biohazard was written by the head of the Russian bioweaponeering program in the 80s-90s. There are literally pictures of him standing with a bunch of scientists in places like Plum Island (i thiknk its actually in Arkansas at the Pine Bluff facility) during one of the many "goodwill" tours the USSR and the US had during treaty negotiations after the cold war.

This book is SCARY. Apparently, the chimera virus so easily discounted earlier in this post is very real, and was an attempt to mix ebola and smallpox and seal it in gelatinized capsules to make it airborne and able to survive the explosion of delivery by bombs. Why bother? Because their research was based on whatever was considered INCURABLE in the west. Several accidents in russian experiments are well documented, and show up in old news reports as "food poisoning" or other polically correct reasons for mass deaths in suburban areas. Apparently in one case, someone got drunk and forgot to put the air filters back on at an Anthrax plant and killed a bunch of folx.

2 points: someone noted that this is small scale research. This is incorrect, as Ken Alibek notes that weaponized germs have to be produced by the TON in order to keep the stockpile of arms fresh enough for maximum impact. Think about what a TON of ebola would do to anywhere. Second, where did all this shit go? He documents how at least one of the starving workers at a smallpox plant slipped out with a live vial (from a lvl4 facility) to try to sell it as a supplemental income. In lots of cases, noone knows where it all went.

The upside is that it mostly doesn't work as effectively as it's billed. Spraying an agent would probably only infect a small number of people, since delivery of a live virus is apparently a very hard thing to accomplish effectively.

-chitlenz