As If We Didn't Already Have Enough To Worry About

Anybody know what happened to New Orleans' anthrax labs? That's the excellent and scary question Defense Tech pal Russ Kick asks over at the Memory Hole.

In and around the Big Easy are a number of Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) labs, meant to handle some of the nastier biological agents out there -- stuff like anthrax, plague, and genetically-engineering mousepox. Louisiana State University’s Medical School and the State of Louisiana both ran BSL-3s within the city. Tulane kept 5,000 monkeys for biodefense studies in its "National Primate Research Center," located in nearby Covington.

"What's happened to the infected animals? Are they free and roaming?" Russ wants to know. "Are they dead, with their diseased bodies floating in the flood waters? And what about the cultures and vials of the diseases? Are they still secure? Are they being stolen? Were they washed away, now forming part of the toxic soup that coats the city?"

And not to turn the fear dial up any higher, but, if the national average is any guide, the keepers of the Louisiana labs weren't particularly experienced. 97 percent of the "principal investigators" who got biodefense grants from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases were newbies to that kind of work.

The government oversight these neophytes get is minimal, at best. Instead, the labs are expected to police themselves, through "Institutional Biosafety Committees." But the records of these committees is, to put it politely, uneven. When the Sunshine Project, a biowatchdog group, "asked for all minutes of all meetings of [Tulane's] IBC since January 1st, 2002, Tulane replied that it has no responsive documents. That is, Tulane University cannot produce a single page of minutes of any Institutional Biosafety Committee meeting for the past two and half years."