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Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

National Homeland Insecurity by Gerry Krownstein The ineptitude and waste of money that characterizes our Department of Homeland Security is paralleled by the stupidity of the regulations and legislation passed since 9/11/01 regarding the handling of deadly biological agents. A revealing article in the November 18-24 issue of New Scientist, a British science weekly, points to policies that may well hinder our ability to detect and deal with biological threats. In an editorial titled “A Climate of Fear”, and a feature article headlined “How the US Crackdown on Bioterrorism is Backfiring”, New Scientist spells out in some detail the contradictory legislation and FBI harassment that are causing researchers in bioterrorism-related areas to leave the field, and to discourage their students from entering it.

The Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act, passed by Congress in 2002, creates a list of 82 viruses, bacteria and toxins that could be used as weapons. Regulations were issued to implement the Act. Neither the Act not the subsequent regulations were well thought out, ignoring as they did significant input from scientists working in the field for decades. These scientists have both a deep desire to prevent the use of these substances by terrorists and a sound understanding of how science, both basic and applied, must be done. Unfortunately, the Act and its regulations were structured to create the kind of bureaucratic confusion that inhibits research while only marginally increasing public safety. Botulism is on the list of toxins, but the identical Botox is exempt. The Centers for Disease Control must give permission for a scientist to work with human pathogens, but the Department of Agriculture controls animal pathogens. Scientists that want to work with pathogens that infect both humans and animals and receive permission from one of those agencies, are often told by the other that they don’t have the right paperwork. Regulations require that clinical labs that grow new cultures of certain pathogens must destroy them within seven days; to get government permission to destroy these pathogens, which is required under a different section of the Act, takes more than seven days.

The end result is a system in which any scientist working on sensitive materials with the utmost care will find himself or herself vulnerable to criminal charges. Already, Thomas Butler, a plague researcher at Texas Tech who dutifully reported the loss of 30 vials of plague bacteria has been arrested by the FBI and charged with numerous crimes. (Plague is not rare or hard to get hold of; it is endemic in prairie-dog colonies. Terrorists knowledgeable enough to weaponize it have no need to steal it.) The chilling effect of this has caused labs to stop reporting routine animal ricin-poisoning incidents, scientists to abandon existing research collections of microbes (that would be invaluable in tracing the origin of disease outbreaks) because of fears of inability comply with current regulations, and researchers to refuse to work on agents that could be used as weapons.

Scientists agree on the need to tighten controls on the use and transportation of dangerous substances. The current laws and regulations, however, have made us less prepared to combat bioterrorism than before. Like the deeply-flawed Patriot Act, panicky legislation serves this country badly.