In November, when we last checked in on Boston University’s peculiar plan to place a laboratory to study the world’s most dangerous pathogens in Boston’s highly-congested South End, an independent panel of the National Research Council had said that the federal review declaring the project safe was hopelessly inadequate and should be done over.
Now, the National Research Council has released its advice on how the new review should be conducted.
Clearly stung by the National Research Council’s November rebuke, NIH director Elias A. Zerhouni commissioned a blue-ribbon panel to conduct a new safety analysis of the lab.
Zerhouni also sought the council’s guidance on how that review should be conducted, which arrived yesterday in the form of a 21-page letter. The council stressed its belief that Biosafety Level-4 labs are needed and that they can be operated safely in urban areas.
“However,” the letter said, “the committee’s view remains that the selection of sites for high-containment laboratories should be supported by detailed analyses and transparent communication of the available scientific information regarding possible risks.”
The council recommended that NIH perform a far more detailed analysis of the risk of lethal germs leaking into the lab’s surrounding neighborhood. And it said the review should include more types of germs than the earlier NIH analysis. Federal scientists should also take into account not only work done in the Biosafety Level-4 lab, but also research conducted in lower-security labs that will operate in the project.
The council emphasized that NIH should carefully weigh the project’s impact on the South End, an economically and ethnically diverse neighborhood with a significant proportion of poor residents.
“Communities, such as the . . . neighborhoods that surround the [project], face challenges that could affect, among other things, the transmission of infectious disease, the health consequences, and the scope and deployment of public health responses,” the council said.
It’s really unbelievable that the previous studies declaring the project safe didn’t do all of that already. That, I guess, is why the National Research Council found the first go-round to be “not sound and credible.” What could they possibly have been thinking? And what was Mayor Menino thinking when he repeatedly refused to take these concerns seriously?
Not in my back yard.
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p>Enough Said.
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p>The South End has more than its fair share. But if Boston wand to be a biotech hub, this comes with the territory.
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p>Yes, all the precautions should be taken and all contingencies planned for.
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The lab is going to be between Albany St and the Mass Ave extension. If someone wacko decides to fill a truck with explosives and drive it up to the building, how exactly is the building not going to be destroyed? If it is destroyed, do you really believe that there is no chance that biological agents will not be released? The fact is, there is no such contingency in their public plan. (Perhaps there is a secret contingency.)
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p>Furthermore, the lab is right next to a large hospital and several homeless shelters, and a detox so if anything gets out there will be handy supply of immuno-compromised people who are likely to get infected and even worse to walk around the city infecting others.
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p>If they want to build a level-4 biohazard lab in Boston, why don’t they at least put it on Long Island where you can provide adequate security.
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p>If they do release a bad virus on the public, what then? There aren’t enough hospital beds in the entire metro area to handle such a crisis (private hospitals have no incentive to have a lot of unused capacity in our current healthcare system).
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p>The idea was dumb from the beginning. It is just BU and Menino getting drunk by the $$$ it will bring in.
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p>BTW, I happen to know this has very little support from the BMC community. BMC tried to get all their doctors to sign a letter saying they thought the lab would be safe, but very few did so.
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While the NIMBY attitude exists, there can be good reasons for opposing a BL4 lab in an urban area–and there might be enough good reasons to relocate it away from an urban area.
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p>”Yes, all the precautions should be taken and all contingencies planned for.”
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p>If BU and City leaders have been less than forthright thus far about safety issues, then one could argue it is reasonable to block the BL4. When three BU researchers somehow got tularemia in their lab, BU and the City kept it quiet. While tularemia is not transmitted person to person, that keep-it-hushed attitude is unsafe, and justifies the public pushing hard against this facility. If they aren’t going to tell people about a disease outbreak that is small and not so dangerous, that gives us little reason to trust them to respond to a serious disease outbreak.
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p>Boston can be a biotech hub without researching the nastiest stuff. This is what a BL4 is for studying:
is in weapon systems in this “post 911 world” don’t you know.
Why is it that nuclear missiles are kept in Nebraska and South Dakota?
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p>1) If one blows up, few people die.
2) If one is attacked and is hit, few people die.
3) If one is attacked but is missed, few people die.
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p>The point is that there is something called “buffer zones” around dangerous activity of all sorts (labs, transfer stations, clemical plants, etc.), which this facility has completely ignored.
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p>The first lab of this sort was built in Maryland on a decommissioned military base, so that there were miles of open space around the facility to protect it and the surrounding community if something went wrong. Unfortunately, when weighing the idea of a reasonable buffer zone versus having the scientist commute, safety lost.