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High-security research labs not so high security & New killer virus makes an appearance & Killer-fever link found by luck
High-security research labs not so high security
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 30 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Intruders could easily break into two U.S. laboratories where researchers handle some of the world's deadliest germs, according to congressional investigators. The Associated Press identified the vulnerable lab locations as Atlanta and San Antonio.
The serious security problems at the two labs were described by the Government Accountability Office in a report expected to be released publicly as early as Thursday. The GAO, Congress' investigative and auditing arm, did not identify the labs except to say they were classified as Biosafety Level 4 facilities, but the report included enough details for the AP — and others knowledgeable about such labs — to determine their locations. Biosafety Level 4 labs do research on deadly germs and toxins.
In Texas, the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research features an outside window that looks directly into the room where the deadly germs are handled. The lab, which is privately run, also lacks many security cameras, intrusion detection alarms or visible armed guards at its public entrances. Officials there said they will tighten security.
"We already have an initiative under way to look at perimeter security," said Kenneth Trevett, president of the lab in San Antonio. "We're waiting for additional input but we're not waiting long. The GAO would like us to do some fairly significant things. They would like us to do it sooner rather than later."
The other lab described with weak security in the report is operated by Georgia State University in Atlanta. That lab lacked complete security barriers and any integrated security system, including any live monitoring by security cameras. During their review, investigators said they watched an unidentified pedestrian enter the building through an unguarded loading dock.
"Georgia State clearly wants its BSL-4 to be as safe as possible," said DeAnna Hines, assistant vice president for university relations. "We are already taking steps that will enhance the lab's safety and security standards." Hines did not confirm the school's research lab was the one mentioned in the congressional report as lacking proper security.
Investigators said the lab in San Antonio used unarmed guards inside antiquated guardhouses with a gate across the access road. An outside company monitors alarms at the lab and calls police in emergencies, which investigators said could delay a quick response in a crisis. They called the San Antonio lab the most vulnerable of all the labs they studied.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the labs in San Antonio and Atlanta to handle the deadly organisms despite the security weaknesses. The three other BSL-4 labs in the U.S. feature impressive security, the report said. Those include the CDC's own facility, also in Atlanta; the Army's lab at Fort Detrick, Md.; and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
Fort Detrick is on a secure military base, but it is known for a recent internal problem. Bruce Ivins, a scientist at the Army's biodefense lab at Fort Detrick, killed himself in July as prosecutors prepared to indict him for murder in the anthrax letter attacks, which killed five people.
The CDC lab is on the agency's high-security campus.
The viruses researched in the highest security labs include ebola, marburg, junin and lassa. All can cause incurable illnesses.
The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., urged the CDC to quickly identify all security weaknesses at the high-containment research labs and fix any problems. Dingell has been investigating security problems associated with such labs around the country. He said at least six additional high-containment labs are under construction.
The Associated Press reported in October 2007 that U.S. laboratories working with deadly organisms have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003 — and the number is increasing as more labs do the work.
A CDC spokesman, Von Roebuck, said each of the five labs described in the new report has its own security plan designed to fit the lab's particular security assessments.
New killer virus makes an appearance
An outbreak of what appears to be a new haemorrhagic fever has brought home how frightening little we know about deadly African viruses. Three people have died and a fourth was ill as New Scientist went to press.
In early September a 36-year-old woman living near Lusaka in Zambia fell ill and was airlifted to South Africa, where she died. Alarms were raised when a paramedic and a nurse who tended her died two weeks later. The latest person to succumb is a nurse who tended the paramedic.
On Sunday, South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) announced that the culprit was an arenavirus, a family of viruses carried by rodents. While several arenaviruses, including Sin Nombre, cause haemorrhagic fevers in the Americas, there was thought to be only one in Africa: Lassa fever, which kills around 5000 people a year in West Africa. "Now suddenly there's this," says Bob Swanepoel of the NICD, an expert on haemorrhagic viruses including the infamous Ebola and Marburg, which belong to the filovirus family.
The US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, is sequencing the Zambian virus to see how it is related to other arenaviruses and whether it is a new strain or one so far unidentified. "It's shocking how little we know about the viruses circulating in Africa," says Swanepoel.
In Africa, arenaviruses are carried by a common farm pest, the multimammate mouse.
Killer-fever link found by luck
By Louise Flanagan
The link between the first two people who died from a viral haemorrhagic fever in Johannesburg recently was discovered by accident.
"It was blind luck," said Dr Nivesh Sewlall who realised the cases were linked.
Sewlall is an intensive-care specialist and lung specialist with an interest in infectious diseases at the Morningside Medi-Clinic Private Hospital in Johannesburg.
"On Monday last week at 4.15pm I made the connection," Sewlall said.
About two weeks earlier, on September 12, critically-ill Cecilia van Deventer had arrived at Morningside from Zambia with an unidentified illness. She died two days later.
Sewlall treated her.
On September 27 paramedic Hannes Els arrived at Morningside. He took care of Van Deventer on the medical charter flight to SA and co-incidentally returned to Morningside when he also became ill, not realising his illness was connected to that of Van Deventer.
On Monday last week, two days after Els arrived, Sewlall overheard a discussion about the new patient that alerted him. He investigated, realised Els had the same symptoms as Van Deventer, and discovered the connection between the pair.
Els died two days later.
The confirmation of the link made it likely that the disease was infectious and probably a viral haemorrhagic fever rather than the ordinary tick-bite fever which doctors had eventually decided Van Deventer probably had.
Sewlall immediately called Dr Lucille Blumberg at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and notified the Department of Health, as haemorrhagic fevers are a notifiable disease.
Sewlall called it one of the fastest linkings of the first cases in an outbreak.
The last time Morningside treated a case of haemorrhagic fever was about 14 years ago, when there was an ebola outbreak in Johannesburg.
On Tuesday experts said more than 100 people were being monitored for signs of haemorrhagic fever but none had shown signs of it yet.
These are the people who were in contact with any of the four people who have died.
The first two deaths and that of a Morningside nurse are believed to be linked while the fourth, a Morningside cleaner, may be.
No further deaths have been reported and although a handful of people were taken to hospital for further observation, none has shown further symptoms.
At Morningside Medi-Clinic, 55 contacts were identified - including the two staff who died - and Sir Albert Robinson Hospital in the West Rand added 66.
Those being monitored will have their temperature taken every six hours every day for 21 days to watch for the onset of fever. Meanwhile they can go to work without danger of infecting anybody.
"You only pass the virus along once you become ill," he said, explaining that quarantining them was unnecessary unless they became ill.
The 11-year-old son of the Morningside nurse who died, Gladys Mthembu, and his caretaker were admitted to Morningside, but Sewlall said this was more for trauma counselling than fears of illness.
Experts said the public should not panic.
"The public at large is not at risk," said Professor Guy Richards, head of critical care at Charlotte Maxege Johannesburg Academic Hospital.
Richards emphasised that those at risk were only people who came into contact with bodily fluids of those who had died. The disease was not air-borne.
Experts dismissed cautions over travel to Zambia, saying malaria was a more likely problem there.
Van Deventer lived in Zambia and is believed to have caught the virus from a tick. No other related cases have been reported in Zambia and an NICD expert is in Zambia tracking all Van Deventer's contacts.
"It's clear that she most likely acquired it in Lusaka," said Blumberg.
While Blumberg, Richards and Sewlall agreed the illness was definitely a viral haemorrhagic fever, the specific fever has not yet been identified.
"We don't have a diagnosis as yet," said Blumberg.
Blood samples were not taken from Van Deventer as doctors ultimately decided she probably had non-infectious tick-bite fever, but samples were taken from the other three who died and sent to NICD for analysis.
Blumberg said it would have been useful to have a sample from Van Deventer too.
She said identifying the virus was difficult because if samples were taken from seriously ill patients they would show the damage caused, but not the virus.
Richards said viruses were very difficult in clinical terms to distinguish from one another.
"Viruses are tricky in that they alter themselves slightly."
Samples were also sent to the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in the US.
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 30 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Intruders could easily break into two U.S. laboratories where researchers handle some of the world's deadliest germs, according to congressional investigators. The Associated Press identified the vulnerable lab locations as Atlanta and San Antonio.
The serious security problems at the two labs were described by the Government Accountability Office in a report expected to be released publicly as early as Thursday. The GAO, Congress' investigative and auditing arm, did not identify the labs except to say they were classified as Biosafety Level 4 facilities, but the report included enough details for the AP — and others knowledgeable about such labs — to determine their locations. Biosafety Level 4 labs do research on deadly germs and toxins.
In Texas, the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research features an outside window that looks directly into the room where the deadly germs are handled. The lab, which is privately run, also lacks many security cameras, intrusion detection alarms or visible armed guards at its public entrances. Officials there said they will tighten security.
"We already have an initiative under way to look at perimeter security," said Kenneth Trevett, president of the lab in San Antonio. "We're waiting for additional input but we're not waiting long. The GAO would like us to do some fairly significant things. They would like us to do it sooner rather than later."
The other lab described with weak security in the report is operated by Georgia State University in Atlanta. That lab lacked complete security barriers and any integrated security system, including any live monitoring by security cameras. During their review, investigators said they watched an unidentified pedestrian enter the building through an unguarded loading dock.
"Georgia State clearly wants its BSL-4 to be as safe as possible," said DeAnna Hines, assistant vice president for university relations. "We are already taking steps that will enhance the lab's safety and security standards." Hines did not confirm the school's research lab was the one mentioned in the congressional report as lacking proper security.
Investigators said the lab in San Antonio used unarmed guards inside antiquated guardhouses with a gate across the access road. An outside company monitors alarms at the lab and calls police in emergencies, which investigators said could delay a quick response in a crisis. They called the San Antonio lab the most vulnerable of all the labs they studied.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the labs in San Antonio and Atlanta to handle the deadly organisms despite the security weaknesses. The three other BSL-4 labs in the U.S. feature impressive security, the report said. Those include the CDC's own facility, also in Atlanta; the Army's lab at Fort Detrick, Md.; and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
Fort Detrick is on a secure military base, but it is known for a recent internal problem. Bruce Ivins, a scientist at the Army's biodefense lab at Fort Detrick, killed himself in July as prosecutors prepared to indict him for murder in the anthrax letter attacks, which killed five people.
The CDC lab is on the agency's high-security campus.
The viruses researched in the highest security labs include ebola, marburg, junin and lassa. All can cause incurable illnesses.
The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., urged the CDC to quickly identify all security weaknesses at the high-containment research labs and fix any problems. Dingell has been investigating security problems associated with such labs around the country. He said at least six additional high-containment labs are under construction.
The Associated Press reported in October 2007 that U.S. laboratories working with deadly organisms have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003 — and the number is increasing as more labs do the work.
A CDC spokesman, Von Roebuck, said each of the five labs described in the new report has its own security plan designed to fit the lab's particular security assessments.
New killer virus makes an appearance
An outbreak of what appears to be a new haemorrhagic fever has brought home how frightening little we know about deadly African viruses. Three people have died and a fourth was ill as New Scientist went to press.
In early September a 36-year-old woman living near Lusaka in Zambia fell ill and was airlifted to South Africa, where she died. Alarms were raised when a paramedic and a nurse who tended her died two weeks later. The latest person to succumb is a nurse who tended the paramedic.
On Sunday, South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) announced that the culprit was an arenavirus, a family of viruses carried by rodents. While several arenaviruses, including Sin Nombre, cause haemorrhagic fevers in the Americas, there was thought to be only one in Africa: Lassa fever, which kills around 5000 people a year in West Africa. "Now suddenly there's this," says Bob Swanepoel of the NICD, an expert on haemorrhagic viruses including the infamous Ebola and Marburg, which belong to the filovirus family.
The US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, is sequencing the Zambian virus to see how it is related to other arenaviruses and whether it is a new strain or one so far unidentified. "It's shocking how little we know about the viruses circulating in Africa," says Swanepoel.
In Africa, arenaviruses are carried by a common farm pest, the multimammate mouse.
Killer-fever link found by luck
By Louise Flanagan
The link between the first two people who died from a viral haemorrhagic fever in Johannesburg recently was discovered by accident.
"It was blind luck," said Dr Nivesh Sewlall who realised the cases were linked.
Sewlall is an intensive-care specialist and lung specialist with an interest in infectious diseases at the Morningside Medi-Clinic Private Hospital in Johannesburg.
"On Monday last week at 4.15pm I made the connection," Sewlall said.
About two weeks earlier, on September 12, critically-ill Cecilia van Deventer had arrived at Morningside from Zambia with an unidentified illness. She died two days later.
Sewlall treated her.
On September 27 paramedic Hannes Els arrived at Morningside. He took care of Van Deventer on the medical charter flight to SA and co-incidentally returned to Morningside when he also became ill, not realising his illness was connected to that of Van Deventer.
On Monday last week, two days after Els arrived, Sewlall overheard a discussion about the new patient that alerted him. He investigated, realised Els had the same symptoms as Van Deventer, and discovered the connection between the pair.
Els died two days later.
The confirmation of the link made it likely that the disease was infectious and probably a viral haemorrhagic fever rather than the ordinary tick-bite fever which doctors had eventually decided Van Deventer probably had.
Sewlall immediately called Dr Lucille Blumberg at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and notified the Department of Health, as haemorrhagic fevers are a notifiable disease.
Sewlall called it one of the fastest linkings of the first cases in an outbreak.
The last time Morningside treated a case of haemorrhagic fever was about 14 years ago, when there was an ebola outbreak in Johannesburg.
On Tuesday experts said more than 100 people were being monitored for signs of haemorrhagic fever but none had shown signs of it yet.
These are the people who were in contact with any of the four people who have died.
The first two deaths and that of a Morningside nurse are believed to be linked while the fourth, a Morningside cleaner, may be.
No further deaths have been reported and although a handful of people were taken to hospital for further observation, none has shown further symptoms.
At Morningside Medi-Clinic, 55 contacts were identified - including the two staff who died - and Sir Albert Robinson Hospital in the West Rand added 66.
Those being monitored will have their temperature taken every six hours every day for 21 days to watch for the onset of fever. Meanwhile they can go to work without danger of infecting anybody.
"You only pass the virus along once you become ill," he said, explaining that quarantining them was unnecessary unless they became ill.
The 11-year-old son of the Morningside nurse who died, Gladys Mthembu, and his caretaker were admitted to Morningside, but Sewlall said this was more for trauma counselling than fears of illness.
Experts said the public should not panic.
"The public at large is not at risk," said Professor Guy Richards, head of critical care at Charlotte Maxege Johannesburg Academic Hospital.
Richards emphasised that those at risk were only people who came into contact with bodily fluids of those who had died. The disease was not air-borne.
Experts dismissed cautions over travel to Zambia, saying malaria was a more likely problem there.
Van Deventer lived in Zambia and is believed to have caught the virus from a tick. No other related cases have been reported in Zambia and an NICD expert is in Zambia tracking all Van Deventer's contacts.
"It's clear that she most likely acquired it in Lusaka," said Blumberg.
While Blumberg, Richards and Sewlall agreed the illness was definitely a viral haemorrhagic fever, the specific fever has not yet been identified.
"We don't have a diagnosis as yet," said Blumberg.
Blood samples were not taken from Van Deventer as doctors ultimately decided she probably had non-infectious tick-bite fever, but samples were taken from the other three who died and sent to NICD for analysis.
Blumberg said it would have been useful to have a sample from Van Deventer too.
She said identifying the virus was difficult because if samples were taken from seriously ill patients they would show the damage caused, but not the virus.
Richards said viruses were very difficult in clinical terms to distinguish from one another.
"Viruses are tricky in that they alter themselves slightly."
Samples were also sent to the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in the US.
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