NYT: Safety Rules Can’t Keep Up With Biotech Industry

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/business/28hazard.html?src=busln

By ANDREW POLLACK and DUFF WILSON
Published: May 27, 2010

They are the highly trained, generally well-paid employees in the vanguard of American innovation: people who work in biotechnology labs. But the cutting edge can be a risky place to work.

The casualties include an Agriculture Department scientist who spent a month in a coma after being infected by the E. coli bacteria her colleagues were experimenting with.


Wendy Carlson for The New York Times

Becky McClain just won a $1.4 million suit from Pfizer.


Another scientist, working in a New Zealand lab while on leave from an American biotechnology company, lost both legs and an arm after being infected by meningococcal bacteria, the subject of her vaccine research.

Last September, a University of Chicago scientist died after apparently being infected by the focus of his research: the bacterium that causes plague.

Whether handling deadly pathogens for biowarfare research, harnessing viruses to do humankind’s bidding or genetically transforming cells to give them powers not found in nature, the estimated 232,000 employees in the nation’s most sophisticated biotechnology labs work amid imponderable hazards. And some critics say the modern biolab often has fewer federal safety regulations than a typical blue-collar factory.

Even the head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration acknowledges that his agency’s 20th-century rules have not yet caught up with the 21st-century biotech industry.

FULL story at link.

[stray cat]

1. All it takes is one accident and sometimes not even that but we have mandatory reporting

for infectious disease exposures