Did U.S. government lie about deadly virus?
Nov. 9, 2005
World Science staff
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051109_flufrm.htm
U.S. officials seem to have quietly reversed an assurance they gave publicly last month—that a deadly virus, which scientists recently recreated, would not leave a secure government facility.
Terrence Tumpey, a microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, examines reconstructed 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus inside a specimen vial. (Courtesy CDC)
Now, authorities acknowledge they may mail copies of the germ, which killed an estimated 50 million people in 1918, to qualified laboratories that apply for it.
The apparent flip-flop suggests the initial assurance might have been a lie, or deception, meant to calm a nervous public about the risky project, says a director of an anti-biological weapons organization.
But U.S. officials say they didn’t mislead anyone.
Scientists and government officials announced last month that they had designed a virus identical in most key respects to the infamous 1918 “Spanish Flu” virus.
The project’s stated purpose was to let scientists study the virus and thereby design vaccines against related pathogens, including a bird flu that is alarming governments worldwide.
But some experts expressed doubts from the start about the venture’s safety. They said the virus could accidentally escape or land in terrorist hands.
In response to such concerns, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga., a U.S. agency, said the virus would be held securely at the agency’s headquarters, and wouldn’t be sent elsewhere for research, according to some news reports.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Oct. 6 that Jennifer Morcone, a spokeswoman for the agency, had given such an assurance. If researchers from outside the agency want to work with the virus, the paper quoted her as saying, “We will consider hosting researchers at the CDC if they go through the same training and clearances required of our researchers.”
The research journal Nature reported similar assurances by the officials. The Chicago Tribune cited CDC Director Julie Gerberding saying the agency had no plans to share the virus with other labs.
The apparent reversal, when it came, was quiet.
It appeared in the form of a cryptic notice—which the agency was legally required to publish—in the Oct. 20 Federal Register, the official publication of federal government notices.
It said the agency would add the virus to a “list of select agents and toxins” maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Basically, this means the virus can be mailed out, agency spokesman Von Roebuck acknowledged, according to a news article in the Nov. 10 Nature.
“Labs that are registered to work with select agents—in particular, dangerous pathogens that are subject to specific handling rules—will be able to request the virus,” Nature reported, citing Roebuck. The parcels could travel via commercial carriers, the journal added.
A staff member who answered the phone at the CDC’s media relations office on Tuesday told World Science that the agency hasn’t announced the new policy publicly, as far as he knows.
The staffer, who identified himself as Chris Cox, referred further questions to Roebuck. Roebuck said in an emailed statement to World Science that the agency didn’t mislead anyone, because officials said only that they were not planning on sending out the virus.
He didn’t deny it would ever happen, though. “Requests to obtain the virus for investigations at non-CDC laboratories that advance the science and understanding of influenza pandemics will be considered on a case-by-case basis,” he wrote, adding that such mailings follow strict safety procedures.
The policy dismayed the project’s critics.
Edward Hammond, director of the U.S. office of the Sunshine Project, a non-profit group that works against chemical and biological weapons useage, said he wasn’t sure whether the agency’s original statement was a lie.
“Did they lie, as in did they know that they were going to flip this policy within a week? I don’t know—it’s difficult to tell, but they certainly in my judgment deceived,” he said.
On the other hand, he said, any expert on the subject would have known that the policy as originally stated was “a fiction to begin with.” That’s because even without the mailing, anyone with the right equipment could have reconstructed the virus using the information released as part of the project.
The no-mailing claim “was a red herring from the get-go,” he said. “It was intended to reassure, when they knew that the assurance that most people would draw from it was based on a misunderstanding.”
But the policy change raises the dangers still further, said Jens Kuhn, a research scholar at Harvard Medical School.
“There’s a big risk associated with it,” he said. He added that officials didn’t announce the mailing policy to begin with “probably because they would have gotten the same kind of heat they’re getting now.”
On the other hand, it might have been a good idea not to announce it, as this could further encourage bioterrorists, said Kuhn, who, like Hammond, opposed the project from the start.
“I don’t understand the logic,” he said, “of creating a threat so we can learn to defend against that threat, that had not existed.”
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http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051109_flufrm.htm
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= EXCLUSIVES =
Two types of paranoia noted: “Poor Me” and “Bad Me”
Two types of paranoia found: “Poor Me” and “Bad Me”
Some paranoid people think they actually deserve their imagined persecution, researchers have found.
http://www.world-science.net/
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HIV Vaccine Design and Development Teams (HVDDT), Divsion of AIDS ...
The HIV Vaccine Design and Development Teams (HVDDT) fund consortia of scientists with development experience from industry and/or academia that have 1) ...
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LANCASTER, Ohio (AP) -- Larry Wayne Harris stands in his second bedroom holding a rack of test tubes.
SOURCE:
"These are the active cultures that I use," he says proudly, ticking off the contents of each glass vial. "Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus, E. coli, Bacillus cereus."
"Also, if I need it ..." he adds, squeezing between the bed and a chest of drawers.
Harris pulls a vial out of a small refrigerator and holds it between his thumb and forefinger. He peers at it though his reading glasses, his Santa Claus beard spreading across his chest like a bib.
It is anthrax, albeit a harmless form of the bacterium used for inoculating livestock against the disease.
This cramped home laboratory could never produce anything like the high-grade anthrax that started turning up at news organizations and in Capitol Hill mailboxes this fall. Harris' lab bench is an old bedroom vanity. The centrifuge on the dresser might look familiar to anybody who took high school biology in the 1950s.
Even so, federal agents investigating the mail attacks have taken a keen interest in Harris and anybody remotely like him. An FBI profile issued in November describes a loner with "access to some laboratory equipment" who "has a scientific background to some extent, or at least a strong interest in science."
That's Harris. And the FBI profile more or less describes a suprisingly robust network of people like him.
Some don't have college degrees; others have Ph.D.s and experience directing university laboratories. Some perform their experiments in basements or spare bedrooms using secondhand equipment; others have their own research institutes.
Most of these citizen scientists have dreams of miracle cures and billion-dollar patents. Others pursue wild conspiracy theories. A few, including Harris, have even dabbled in chemical or biological weapons.
Harris got himself in hot water a few years ago when he tried to use somebody else's credentials to mail-order the organism that causes bubonic plague. He said he needed the bacteria to do research for his book, a guide to biological warfare defense.
Harris might have succeeded if he hadn't called the biological supplier a few days later to inquire about his shipment. The employee who took his call at the American Tissue and Culture Collection became suspicious and notified authorities. The day after the bacteria arrived at Harris' home, so did a swarm of federal agents. Harris eventually pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced to 18 months' probation.
Jessica Stern, a Harvard University bioterrorism expert familiar with Harris, thinks he's harmless. "I don't think he would actually do anything," she said.
But she's not so sure about some of the other do-it-yourselfers. Stern said when she first heard about the high-quality anthrax sent to South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle's Capitol office, she thought immediately of James Dalton Bell.
The MIT-trained scientist might have been a prime suspect except for one thing. Since August, Bell has been serving a 10-year sentence at a federal prison in Lompoc, Calif.
Agents raided Bell's house in Vancouver, Wash., after he threatened two federal officials. Inside they found a toxic nerve agent and other dangerous substances in his basement lab. On a computer they found recipes for making chemical weapons. Witnesses told investigators that he had tried to make botulinum toxin. He had also boasted of making sarin gas, the agent used in a Tokyo subway attack that killed 12 and sickened thousands, court records said.
"James Dalton Bell is the model of the lone wolf that the FBI worries most about," Stern said. "Someone who is technically proficient, who has it in for the government."
Thomas Leahy is another. Leahy had mixed nicotine with a solvent that allowed it to penetrate skin, enabling him to deliver a lethal dose with a few spritzes from a spray bottle. He had also produced ricin, a highly lethal toxin derived from castor beans; authorities said he had enough to kill more than 100 people. Leahy is now in prison.
No one knows how many of these closet biologists exist. But like many once invisible subcultures, they now share theories, results and concerns on the Internet. A few have been accused of using the Web to raise money outside the traditional scientific peer review process.
"Some of these people have sort of a cottage industry," said Gregory Gray, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa.
Former University of Texas cancer researcher Garth Nicolson now runs his own private research laboratory, the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach, Calif. Most of the papers published by the lab's 40 researchers concern cancer metastasis. But it is Nicolson's studies of Gulf War Syndrome that have drawn the most attention. Nicolson believes the mysterious symptoms experienced by some veterans of the Persian Gulf war are caused by an obscure microbe he believes Iraq may have used as a biological weapon.
Epidemiologists who have studied Gulf War illness dismiss that hypothesis, and efforts to replicate his findings have failed. But because of intense pressure from other advocates who believe Nicolson, the government has funded his research anyway.
Nicolson's institute makes additional money by testing hundreds of blood samples each week for bacteria and other substances. It also attracts contributions from private donors. The institute's IRS forms show that it takes in more than $1 million in contributions a year.
Not all independent operations are so financially successful. Researchers at the non-profit Institute for Applied Biomedicine have developed an innovative concept for an AIDS drug. But because they are wary of turning over research rights to a biotechnology company or university, most of their funding comes from raffles, wine tastings and bowl-a-thons.
"This is going to take time," said Sherrie McMahon, operations director at the institute. "But in the end we're quite confident this is going to be an important drug, so we're just patient."
The odds are long. In the era of biotechnology, major advances are almost never made outside the university, government and corporate laboratories of the scientific establishment. Except for those whose experiments with dangerous substances attract the attention of law enforcement, most do-it-yourself biologists are destined for obscurity.
SOURCE:
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