Small victory in bio-lab fight

Opponents of a possible National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility won a small victory last night when the Durham County commissioners voted 4-1 to oppose locating the facility in the Granville County town of Butner. I say small victory, because these things are rarely decided by the support or opposition of neighboring local governments.

According to a report on WRAL, the Butner site is still the the number one ranked out of the 5 finalist sites, and the apparent willingness of the state of North Carolina to sell the land to the feds for a buck doesn't hurt that.

Several published reports this week suggest that some behind the scenes hardball has boosted the chances of one of the locations, despite the fact that it wasn't originally ranked highly enough to have made the final cut:

The Associated Press will report Monday that DHS last year rated a site under consideration at Flora, Miss., as significantly less suitable for the lab than the four other finalists, and also as less suitable than several sites that were excluded from final consideration.

The inclusion of Flora as a finalist, the A.P. will suggest, may have been in reaction to the clout the Mississippi Congressional delegation holds within the DHS procurement process. A Democrat from that state, Rep Bennie Thompson, is chairman of the department's oversight committee in the House, and Sen. Thad Cochran is the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, the panel expected to approve money to build the lab.

Durham County joins the Granville County Commission, the Raleigh City Council, and the Butner Town Council in opposing the lab. Some reports do indicate that the potential for organized community opposition cost Madison, Wisconsin a place among the finalists, despite ranking higher than the Mississippi site overall.

I also want to say that i really hope that Commissioner Lewis Cheek isn't as clueless about how things work as he sounds:

While acknowledging that speakers had raised important safety questions that needed to be answered, Cheek said it was too early to form an opinion because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has yet to finalize its environmental impact statement on the project or to decide whether it prefers building the foreign-animal-disease research laboratory in Butner or at one of five competing sites.

Once DHS decides where to build the site, it's going to be a little late for a local government to start opposing it. The draft EIS is also where any opposition needs to happen. Once the draft is finalized, the decision on where to build the facility will be made in less than 30 days.

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Death knell

This should put the final nail in the coffin of the plans to site a "National Bio and Agro Defense Facility in Butner, or anywhere else in the mainland US for that matter.

The Bush administration relied on a flawed study to conclude that research on a highly infectious animal disease could safely be moved from an isolated island laboratory to sites on the mainland near livestock, congressional investigators concluded in findings obtained by The Associated Press.

The Homeland Security Department "does not have evidence" that foot-and-mouth disease research can be conducted on the U.S. mainland without significant risk of an animal epidemic, Congress' Government Accountability Office said.

. . .

"We found that DHS has not conducted or commissioned any study to determine whether FMD (foot-and-mouth disease) work can be done safely on the U.S. mainland," according to testimony prepared for the committee by Nancy Kingsbury, the GAO's managing director for applied research and methods.

Jay Cohen, an undersecretary of Homeland Security, said in his prepared testimony: "While there is always a risk of human error ... the redundancies built into modern research laboratory designs and the latest biosecurity and containment systems ... effectively minimizes these risks."

Department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said risk assessments are being conducted at each proposed site to evaluate impacts of hypothetical foot-and-mouth disease releases. The public will be asked to comment on the findings.

The administration based its decision of safe mainland research on a 2002 Agriculture Department study on whether it was technically feasible to do the work onshore.

Kingsbury said there's a major distinction between what is technically feasible and "what is possible, given the potential for human error."

"We found that the study was selective in what it considered," she said. "It did not assess the history of releases of FMD virus or other dangerous pathogens, either in the United States or elsewhere."

It also did not address the dangers of working with infected large animals; the virus can be carried in a person's lungs, nostrils or other body parts, making him or her a possible vehicle for a virus escape. The study also did not consider the history of accidents in laboratories, the GAO said.

The AP reported in April that a 1978 release of the virus into cattle holding pens on Plum Island triggered new safety procedures. While that incident was previously known, Homeland Security officials acknowledged there were other accidents at Plum Island.

The GAO report listed six other accidents between 1971 and 2004.

"These incidents involved human error, lack of proper maintenance, equipment failure and deviation from standard operating procedures," the GAO said. "Many were not a function of the age of the facility or the lack of technology and could happen in any facility today."

The investigators found that the United States only avoided international restrictions after the 1978 outbreak because it was confined to the island.

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