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High Security Animal Disease Lab Faces Uncertain Future
Dupple writes in with a story about the uncertain future of a proposed bio lab in the heart of cattle country. "Plans to build one of the world's most secure laboratories in the heart of rural America have run into difficulties. The National Bio and Agro defense facility (NBAF) would be the first US lab able to research diseases like foot and mouth in large animals. But reviews have raised worries about virus escapes in the middle of cattle country. For over fifty years the United States has carried out research on dangerous animal diseases at Plum Island, just off the coast of New York. However after 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security raised concerns about the suitability of the location and its vulnerability to terrorist attack."
The scientists owe it to the people there to reduce the risk of an escaped pathogen by as much as they can. Once they do that, there really shouldn't be anything to complain about--it would just be pure, irrational fear from what I can see.
I'm sure that security is better where God and the County Sheriff are packing.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
THAT... sounds completely stupid. i'd want to put something like this somewhere it CAN'T do any harm if it gets out...
The arctic sounds nice.
I also kind of wonder what kind of nasty stuff got washed out of plum island in the hurricane. There's some fairly scary storys about that place. Oh sure most is prolly overblown bullcrap. But it only takes a little truth to kill a whole bunch of people... :(
I know people that work on plum island. They say that the place will be open till at least 2021. The decision to move it was purely political. At the time the local governments did not want a level 4 facility on the island, Once it was announced that the research would be moved to Kansas they recanted. There has also been much discussion about the wisdom of moving it to the middle of tornado alley and cattle country. Terrorism has had little effect on the decision, an island makes it very easy to control who comes and goes as compared to a facility reachable by foot. It would not surprise me to see them upgrade Plum island and cancel the project in Kansas, on the other hand it is up to the usual political backroom deals.
The Lunatick, Carpe Corpus!
that's what I was thinking as soon as I saw the title.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
that's dumb, solid ingress egress control (double doors can't open both ends at once) is really all that is needed
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
"28 Days Later"
Kids... Always with the zombies
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Meanwhile, everyone's been ramming through a BSL-4 facility which will study live human diseases, right smack in the middle of Boston:
http://www.wbur.org/2012/04/19/biolab-research-approval
They picked a poor minority neighborhood they and city officials could bully around, and despite public uproar, soon residents can look forward to being neighbors with Ebola.
Apparently BU just couldn't be bothered to build it, say, out somewhere in the suburbs where there'd be some isolation from the general populace. Let's put it right smack in the middle of a city with a big public transit system and an international airport, just so our researchers won't have to hop in a car for a drive. BRILLIANT.
Please help metamoderate.
Man, good thing the CDC doesn't have a BSL4 lab in Atlanta, where they're headquartered. Oh, wait.
There is no place more isolated than the arctic. We have had bases there in the past, one even had a sub reactor to power it. Considering the fact that the environment is very much not in tune with the needs of any escaped pathogens I would say that it is just about the best choice. It would be hard to access and harder to enter. Get down under the rock and you are safe and contained with no vectors of escape of the bugs. It is a far better choice than the bread basket of the USA and allot of the world. Mike
What I'm concerned about is a bunch of militant "animal rights" nitwits getting in and "liberating" diseased animals, causing all kinds of hell.
The University that I attended had a large agriculture department. They had a bunch of caged chickens. Healthy but caged. Activists freed them and the chickens soon started to die. Apparently living in cages with wire bottoms suspended a few feet off the ground did not prepare their immune systems for what waited on the ground below. They all got sick and most died.
Yes, surely no one will ever become complacent after working there for a long time.
Many biological safety and containment protocols are regularly disregarded at least in part because scientists think that their own lower assessment of the risk is more accurate than the "bureaucrats" who designed the protocols. Dealing with the lab moron(s) in BSL-2 is a pain. Dealing with them in BSL-4 is potentially deadly.
Stupidity finds a way. That's why designs must be as foolproof as possible.
I thought the first outbreak was in Queens, not right next to Plum Island. Considering West Nile Virus has virtually no symptoms in 80% of the people it infects, and was well spread in parts of Asian, Australia and western Europe by the 60s (not to mention Africa where it came from, where in the 50s it was found 90% of people tested in Egypt had West Nile Virus antibodies), it is kind of surprising it took another 30 years to get to the US.
For the record, there's a massive human disease lab located right in the middle of tornado alley. Oklahoma if I'm not mistaken.
By the way, it's more fun if you read the article title as High Security Animal, Disease Lab Faces Uncertain Future.
Gotta watch out for those high security animals, lol.
I'm not worried about some virus spontaneously escaping into the wild. What I'm concerned about is a bunch of militant "animal rights" nitwits getting in and "liberating" diseased animals, causing all kinds of hell.
I've heard that one of the more difficult aspects of working in a level 4 lab is learning not to catch things that are falling, such as scalpels, and that when the scientists go home after work, they don't catch tableware and glasses and such, leading to much domestic strife.
(I don't know how true it is, but it seems to make sense.)
I'm not worried about some virus spontaneously escaping into the wild.
You should be, it's happened before. The most likeliest explanation for lyme disease is accidental release from Plum Island, carried away on ticks by migrating deer.
Learn to love Alaska
Queens is on Long Island, and a number of Plum Island workers lived near NYC and commuted (with the ferry schedules and dorms on site, you didn't have to go home every night, for commuting the full length of long island).
And at Plum island they weaponized them, even though it was a non-military FDA site. Their excuse was that they needed to weaponise them to be able to defend our livestock against them.
Learn to love Alaska
I heard the same from butchers and glassblowers.
bickerdyke
blacksmiths too.
I dunno about that Manhattan/Lawrence is probably the nations breadbasket for LSD, outfreaking San Francisco. Do you really want to chance some government sponsored psychedelic terror? Other than that, they need to put it down by the Mexican border to scare aliens or something. We raise Black Angus here mostly, the most delicious cow. Get your damn priorities straight.
The only thing evident to me is that New York shows every sign of being affected and producing negative mutations/diseases for the years it hosted the facility. Stick it in your own back yard, Yobbo!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
This nearly literal pork-barrel facility (which is already built, BTW) is about a quarter mile up the street of the main campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. It is however, within eyesight of the a) football stadium, b) basketball coliseum, and c) student recreational center. Bonus: just to the west of all of that is the only hospital in the city. Not that animal diseases *ever* jump to humans...
This was all mainly due to one of the worst US Senators in the modern age: Pat Roberts. His other claim to fame was putting off the investigations of the Iraq invasion lies until after the elections to 'take politics out of it'. After the election, he then claimed there was no point in investigating the lies as the past is the past, spilt milk, etc. Scumbag.
I think it is a stupid idea to place this where there will be lots of damage when things get out. And they will get out. Just like it is impossible to have code with zero bugs, it is impossible there will be no mistakes.
Does anyone else remember this report about the air flow being redirected from inside the lab to the hallway outside where people don't wear protective gear? Bad Air Vents
In February, air from inside a potentially contaminated lab briefly blew outward into a “clean” corridor where a group of visitors weren’t wearing any protective gear which raised concern about exposure risks, according to e-mails reporting and discussing what happened. Research animals in the lab had not yet been infected at the time of the incident, the records say.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
And were these magical, space-time traveling deer, as well? Able to go back hundreds of years in time, and reappear on an island off the coast of Scotland?
I guess you're right - this is just more evidence of conspiracy! Who else but the US government would have the resources to genetically engineer time traveling deer and send them back in time to Scotland? It's probably a neocon plot - adding up each of the digits in '1764' gives you '18.' Add up those digits, and you get '9' - as in 9-11!? And you think this is coincidence, people?
double doors controlled by security team, swipe badges security guard opens inner door.
keeps morons out, and if morons manage to subvert security and let animals loose, the animals can't get out
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I think even that is a pretty significant stretch with nothing but speculation to support it. The disease was already known before Plum island was even a twinkle in Uncle Sam's eye. The most likely explanation for the incidence of Lyme disease would be that the tick and its parasites came across the Atlantic with colonists from Europe (where the disease was fairly well known), established a foothold, and has been present and spreading since.
The fact that a cluster of cases in 1975 around Lyme, Connecticut happened to be near Plum Island is far from conclusive proof that Plum Island was the source of that (or subsequent, or any) outbreaks. It is statistically possible that ticks being studied at Plum Island somehow escaped and made their way to Lyme... but the ticks and their parasites were already present in Lyme (and elsewhere), and there's no suggestion that the cluster in Lyme was some sort of "genetically engineered superbug" - it was just a normal outbreak of a disease which has been emerging in clusters around the US for decades.
High Security Animal Disease Lab Faces Uncertain Future
Thanks to quantum mechanics, don't we all?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yeah, the zombie strawmen will get us all! Run for the hills!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
the ticks and their parasites were already present in Lyme
Then why wasn't there a documented outbreak in Lyme before that?
Learn to love Alaska
I figured it would be obvious Queens is on Long Island,
Americans can't identify most states on a map, to assume everyone knows where boroughs of NYC are would seem to be an overestimation of general geographic knowledge.
Even if they get a lot of workers from Plum Island, they would also be getting a lot of travelers too.
It's not like there are any international airports in Queens.
But, given that the first major outbreak of Lyme disease in the US was geographically adjacent to Plum (far from airports), and Plum was studying it before release, it seems likely that there was at least one major containment breach, indicating the likelihood of another is much higher.
Learn to love Alaska
Nobody's claimed they did. It's a zoonotic infection, and it's VERY common for diseases like that to circulate in their animal reservoirs (mice & deer, in this case), until conditions line up just right for an outbreak. In this case, the tick that transmits it feeds on blood three times in its life, once for each phase. This means a tick, in order to infect someone, has to first feed on a mouse or a deer infected with the bacteria, and THEN feed on a human during a subsequent phase. Conditions have to line up properly for that to happen, and even being bitten by a tick, it generally requires a significant amount of undisturbed feeding time to transmit the disease - it's not a case where infection occurs the INSTANT a person is bitten - this is why tick checks are important, and effective, in reducing the likelihood of infection.
The genetic material from the North American strain of bacteria that causes Lyme disease has been found in museum specimens dating back to the 1800's, and according to Wikipedia, they found B. burgdorferi DNA in a 5300 year old mummified ice age hunter. There's a lot of evidence that the pathogen has been around for centuries.
Then surely you can provide us with some examples of scientists disputing this?
Yes, it came from the natural animal reservoirs for the disease - mice and deer. As human developments encroach on woodlands and pastures where these animals live, more humans come in contact with the animals (and, as a result, their parasitic passengers). This is exactly how most zoonotic infections break out. A pathogen whose DNA has been found on hundreds and thousands of year old museum samples cannot have been "manufactured" exclusively at Plum Island in 1975.
Also - how could Plum Island have been "studying Lyme Disease" in 1975, when Lyme Disease was not identified as a tick-borne illness, with a bacterial cause isolated, until 1982? (Do you see how the sequence of these things is sort of important?)
Researchers in Europe had seen numerous cases of "neurological problems after tick bites," and erythema migrans - the expanding "bullseye" lesion that is a hallmark of the disease - long before any outbreaks in 1975 in Connecticut. They didn't isolate the pathogen until 1982, but they were describing the disease and its components for decades:
It's a vector borne disease - you can't pass it from human to human during normal contact, it requires the tick vector, and so it's quite easy to imagine that some infected mice were carried over into new england at some point (perhaps even as far back as the 1600's and 1700's colonization), and those mice found a welcoming habitat here in North America, where they began to spread, and the disease happily circulated in them as a reservoir for years, with cases of all of these syndromes cropping up over time but not being recognized as related to tick bites until the cases in Lyme, where researches connected the neurological issues with the erythema migrans they saw in their patients, and related it to the disease being described by their colleagues in Europe.
The genetic material from the North American strain of bacteria that causes Lyme disease has been found in museum specimens dating back to the 1800's, and according to Wikipedia, they found B. burgdorferi DNA in a 5300 year old mummified ice age hunter. There's a lot of evidence that the pathogen has been around for centuries.
Every disease has been around for a long time. The problem is we may not have the ability to look back in time.
A pathogen whose DNA has been found on hundreds and thousands of year old museum samples cannot have been "manufactured" exclusively at Plum Island in 1975.
Also - how could Plum Island have been "studying Lyme Disease" in 1975, when Lyme Disease was not identified as a tick-borne illness, with a bacterial cause isolated, until 1982? (Do you see how the sequence of these things is sort of important?)
I never said "manufactured". You don't need to make up things about what I said to make yourself feel better. You indicated that Lyme disease has been around for thousands of years, and that it was identified as a disease hundreds of years ago. Someone, somewhere had to study it in a lab to isolate the pathogen in 1982. And the disease was known prior to 1975, so why are you so sure that the premier lab tasked with protecting US agricultural animals from disease would not have a sample of diseased tissue from livestock infected with that particular pathogen? That's what they do. They just don't do it as well as the CDC labs (they don't have the same budget as the higher-profile human protection labs, they are only supposed to look into livestock diseases, like Lyme and anthrax and such).
For the conspiracy theory to be true, the mice would have to be time travelers,
You keep asserting that, but nobody has stated that the disease was created by man, just released.
1. Thousands of years ago a disease develops and is later found in preserved samples from that era.
2. After centuries, the disease is isolated to small islands and lives only in livestock with occasional transmission into people.
3. The US Animal Disease Center, hearing about these isolated incidents, gets diseased tissue to study.
4. In standard practice, the lab deliberately infects animals with diseased tissue to study pathology in livestock.
5. In a breach of containment, a tick feeds on an infected animal.
6. That infected tick travels on a deer to Lyme, infecting the deer and possibly infecting others.
7. The disease spreads from that incident, with Plum Island not ever isolating and identifying the disease, a job left for 7 years later after the disease spreads to humans and makes it on the news. Plum Island fails to respond to FOIA requests regarding the diseases being studied.
Which of those steps is beyond your comprehension?
Learn to love Alaska
Lucky for us this is one of the ones we DO have the ability to identify in centuries-old samples of ticks, mice, and humans. Making a general assertion that "sometimes we can't look back" is an inadequate argument to counter the fact that it's been found in multiple centuries-old samples.
I'll once again act the direct question you ignored:
It's a pretty simple question.
Yes, his name was Willy Burgdorfer, and that's why the microbe is named after him.
Then surely you can provide us with some examples of scientists disputing this?
The Black Plague was believed to be the Bubonic plague. Then it wasn't. Then it was again. I'm not sure where it sits today.
Yes, his name was Willy Burgdorfer, and that's why the microbe is named after him.
That's an odd assumption. Nobody ever studied it before him. Can you support that assumption? Because it must be true for your correction to be on topic.
Learn to love Alaska
I'll once again act the direct question you ignored:
It's a pretty simple question.
It's not an assumption at all - it's fact. He isolated the bacteria in 1982. The disease itself was described in medical literature LONG before 1975, and its genes have been isolated from museum samples hundreds and thousands of years old. In other words - it existed in North America and Europe long before the any alleged disease "escape" from Plum Island.
Perhaps, since you're alleging that the pathogen was released from Plum Island, perhaps you can show that it was studied there, or show that the US government knew what the active agent was, or was studying it in any way, prior to 1975, or Burgdorfer isolating it in 1982.
It's not an assumption at all - it's fact. He isolated the bacteria in 1982. The disease itself was described in medical literature LONG before 1975, and its genes have been isolated from museum samples hundreds and thousands of years old. In other words - it existed in North America and Europe long before the any alleged disease "escape" from Plum Island.
Your argument makes sense only if you assume he isolated it without ever studying it. Otherwise, it had to have been in a lab before it was isolated. I don't believe he isolated it without ever studying it. And it's silly to assume he was the *only* person on the planet to study it. Ever. It was a licestock disease primarily before 1975, and Plum Island is tasked with studying livestock diseases. Trade in "diseased tissue" (where the component involved, bacteria or virus, is not known) is common, and Plum Island has confirmed working with such samples (as it was a requirement for some of their funding, though they did not identify the exact diseases being studied, it's reasonable to assume that they had Lyme disease at that time.
I find your assertion that it's impossible for a government lab studying livestock diseases to have a livestock disease before the disease is isolated to be silly, when it's labs like that who make discoveries like isolating the bacteria that causes Lyme disease (and the "discoverer" worked at a BSL-4 lab, the same type as Plum Island), and as it wasn't isolated before he isolated it, it must have come from diseased tissue, like Plum Island has tons of. Less likely and more conspiracy-theory-related, it's possible it was "discovered" at Plum Island first, then the information was shared with somewhere far from there because they realized the link would be stronger if the discovery of it was at where it was accidentally released a few years before.
Learn to love Alaska