Re: Biological Warfare Agents

[Steven Pollack <themissinglink@eznetinc.com>]

Reading this article posted by Jim Oyler a few days ago got me thinking
about the UXO clearance worker dangers always brought up as a reason to
not remediate UXO sites. I have always maintained that while a
dangerous occupation, the DoD may not be doing everything they can to
develop worker protections to make such cleanups less dangerous and
therefore try to shift the responsibility for worker dangers to those
environmentalists calling for higher cleanup standards.

I fail to grasp the difference between a biological warfare worker in a
lab trying to protect Americans from hostile BW attack and an
environmental remediation worker trying to protect Americans from toxins
discarded by the military over the past 100 years. Maybe the DoD finds
the BW lab a more mission oriented use of funds but it is to the same
purpose.

Should we shut down these labs since workers have become infected in
spite of the precautions? No, of course not. We must develop better
worker protections to allow them to complete their work in the safest
environment possible. Just as we should be developing safer UXO tools
instead of using the dangers as a reason to avoid the mission.

Steven Pollack
http://www.familyjeweler.com/rdx.htm

Albuquerque Journal
November 06, 1998, Friday
(edited)
They would join the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases
as the nation's only labs performing defense research using live
biowarfare and bioterrorism agents.

Roughly half the lab's work would be in the national-security arena, for
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Defense or
other federal agencies, lab officials said.

"The FBI wants the answer now: Is it a viable organism? What strain is
it?" said biophysicist Scott Cram, director of LANL's Life Sciences
Division, citing an example of the lab's proposed work.
Samples of tissue or dirt -- for example, collected by a United Nations
inspection team -- would be delivered in triple-layered packaging.
Molecular biologists would use LANL-pioneered advances in DNA
fingerprinting to identify any suspected biological warfare and
bioterrorism agents.

The rest of the new lab's work would be joint research with the New
Mexico Department of Health and the University of New Mexico, both of
which are eager for help with infectious-disease research.

The number of BSL-3 labs in the United States is unknown because they
are not licensed or regulated by any federal agency. Workers in such
labs have been infected, mostly by tuberculosis, but there are no
recorded infections of humans or animals by organisms escaped from a
BSL-3 lab in the United States.