Bioterror pork in Bean Town

The north San Joaquin Valley public might benefit from considering a few remarks made by Boston University professors regarding the Bio Safety Level-4 laboratory under construction in Boston now. Although the National Emerging Infectius Diseases Laboratory is sited in a densely populated lower income neighborhood, while the proposed site for the UC/Bechtel, Etc./Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory BSL-4 is in the middle of a bomb-testing range east of Tracy, what the BU professors said pertains. Rather than considering BSL-4 labs as vital elements of national security, it might be useful to consider then military pork projects potentially quite dangerous to nearly human and animal residents.

“The funding for the lab was based on the assessment that the U.S. needed more BSL-4 capacity to defend against the ‘GWOT’ (global war on terrorism),” George Annas, BU health and law professor and one of the voices of opposition from within the university, told a conference on May 5.

“I think this is incorrect, and the building of more labs devoted to ‘bioterrorism’ both overstates the need and creates at least as much, if not more, dangers” for the community, said Annas, author of “American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries“...

“The problem with labs like this is they concentrate on agents that are extremely unlikely to afflict humans (for example, inhalational anthrax) and use scarce resources that could be applied to real threats from national and emerging infectious diseases,” BU environmental health professor David Ozonoff said in an interview for this report.

Karen Slater, who works in the BU department of anatomy and neurobiology, where the relationship between problems involving the brain and arterial pressure are studied, said that “money that has been for basic research is now directed to the Homeland Security Department.”

Furthermore, the proliferation of BSL-4 labs could have other repercussions for security.

“In research on next-generation (pathogenic) agents, we will be engaging in an arms race with ourselves,” says microbiology chief Ebright.

Because no other country has the capacity to develop these agents, “we potentially will be arming our adversaries,” warned the scientist. -- May 15, 2007, Inter Press Service

Bill Hatch
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5-15-07
Inter Press Service
Boston Residents Face to Face with Bio-War
by Zilia Castrillón
www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37737
BOSTON, United States - The U.S. government and Boston University are facing protests and lawsuits for building a laboratory to research potential biological weapons in a neighborhood whose residents are mostly African-American and Latinos.Approved by the federal government in February 2006, the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory is better known locally as the BSL-4, for biosafety level 4, the highest risk, determined by the type of material the scientists are working with. Construction began in March and the lab is scheduled for completion in 2008.
“They sell us the idea of the laboratory in our neighborhood because it would provide jobs for the families. The work in reality is not for us, but for the high-level researchers that will move here,” says social worker Carmen Nazario, of Puerto Rican origin, and a resident of Villa Victoria, a community of predominantly Latin American immigrants in Boston’s South End.
Within about a one-kilometer radius of the site live some 50,000 people. Boston, in the north-eastern U.S. state of Massachusetts, is home to more than 600,000 people...
Nazario is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the federal government and Boston University, accused of violating national environmental law in failing to study the laboratory’s possible risks and effects on the communities’ health.
The original lawsuit was filed in May 2005. As a result, the court called for new environmental and health impact studies, which were to be presented last month for public review, but have been delayed.
The case will be taken up by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, of which Boston is the capital, to determine whether construction of the lab will continue or not.
According to Boston University (BU), which received 128 million dollars from the National Institutes of Health and is to pay its share of 50 million dollars to complete construction, it is imperative to begin medical research about pathogenic agents and the human immune response to them...