College labs a bioterrorism disaster waiting to happen
Friday, November 21, 2003 8:26 AM PST
By Associated Press
Printable version
E-mail this articleWASHINGTON -- Government investigators found widespread potential for bioterrorism mischief at many college laboratories funded by the Agriculture Department, including an unlocked freezer supervised only by a college lecturer and containing a biological agent for a plague more severe than the Black Death.
"Officials we spoke with about this situation believed there was a strong possibility that similar conditions existed at a number of other institutions," Agriculture's inspector general's office said in a report.
One lab, outfitted for a researcher working with some of the most high-risk biological agents, was found in a building 30 yards from the football stadium and open for bathroom use during night games. Many people have keys, but sometimes doors remain unlocked.
Another containing a pathogen that causes a severe and often fatal contagious disease in swine never had a complete inventory and could be accessed at any time by graduate students with no documentation.
The inspector general's office, after inspecting 104 labs at 10 universities and a private institution during the summer of 2002, urged the White House and the Homeland Security Department to take a closer look at the dangers and issue one set of standards governing security of hazardous materials. The report did not identify the labs.
The chief finding: Many of the labs don't keep track of their biological, chemical and radioactive materials -- and those that do rarely are accurate.
Only two of the institutions had a centralized database for a summary-level inventory of biological agents or chemicals at their labs. Just five had formal procedures for reporting missing pathogens.
Buildings housing the labs commonly lacked alarm systems, surveillance cameras, keycard devices and sign-in sheets or the use of ID badges. Doors were not always locked, locks were left unchanged even after keys were lost or stolen and cleaning staff in many cases had access to the labs after hours when no one was around.
In one case, inspectors found an unlocked freezer containing seven vials of Yersinia pestis, considered one of the highest-risk materials, which had been stored since 1981. It causes bubonic plague, or Black Death, and pneumonic plague, an airborne pathogen even more severe that infects the lungs and is almost 100 percent fatal within 48 hours of symptoms.
The last inventory for the freezer was in 1994, and it was incomplete. The freezer wasn't in a research lab, but in an area of the university controlled only by a lecturer of undergraduate science -- who destroyed the vials after government inspectors raised concerns.
Agriculture Department officials generally agreed with the report's findings.
"We agree that a consolidated set of security standards should apply to all organizations handling various types of biohazardous material," Jeremy Stump, the department's acting homeland security director, wrote in a letter to the inspector general's office.
The inspector general's office recommends:
• Create a central database for all biological materials stored at research labs.
• Establish written procedures for checking the backgrounds of lab workers and reporting missing pathogens.
• Study the potential risks at all labs and make security fixes based on those assessments.
The inspections were done as part of a broad review after Sept. 11, 2001, to find how the department might be vulnerable to terrorist attacks or inadvertently enable someone to mount domestic attacks.
Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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