U.S. Called Lax at Policing Labs Handling Biohazards

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: New York Times

By ERIC LIPTON
Published: October 5, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — The federal government is failing to supervise properly a greatly expanded network of public and private laboratories handling deadly agents like anthrax and Ebola, Congressional investigators and public health experts testified on Thursday.

At a five-hour hearing called by a House panel looking into conditions at the laboratories, witnesses described a number of troubling incidents, including one last year at Texas A&M University in College Station, Tex., in which university authorities failed to report that a lab worker had been infected with brucellosis, an animal disease.

“We don’t even know where they are, what we got, what we are doing,” Representative Michael C. Burgess, Republican of Texas, said of the growing number of these specialized laboratories financed by the federal government since 2001. The panel chairman, Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, said, “No one is in charge here.”

Dr. Richard Besser, director of an agency at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that coordinates terrorism preparedness, testified that federal investigators there had not found any cases in which a regulated pathogen or biological toxin was released outside the lab. But since 2003, there have been three confirmed releases within laboratories that together sickened five workers, Dr. Besser said. He agreed with other Bush administration officials who testified that better federal oversight of the research was needed....

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/us/05labs.html