Scientists spar at BioLab hearing
South End News
Issue Date: 10/25/2007, Posted On: 10/25/2007
by Lou Manzo
Boston University scientist David Ozonoff sparred with his own colleagues concerning the National Health Institute’s (NIH) risk assessment of Boston University Medical Center’s Biosafety Level 4 Lab (BioLab). During a National Research Council hearing about the report on Oct. 19, Ozonoff described it as “dismissive” and “wrong,” contradicting the testimony of his fellow faculty.
The Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) paid $50,000 to the Washington, D.C.-based Council, which works under the auspices of the National Academy of Science to improve government decision-making and public policy, to review a NIH risk assesment of the BioLab The Council was charged to determine whether the analyses of the assessment were sound, whether “worst case scenarios” were identified, and whether the location of the BioLab in the South End posed a greater possible risk than other sites.
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Ralph D. Gant ordered the NIH to research a new risk assessment after he deemed the original analysis of risk inadequate on Aug. 6, 2006 because it failed to identify “worst case scenarios.” Some neighborhood activists maintain that the new risk assessment is as inadequate as the previous version, while NIH and BU officials claim that it is thorough.
Deborah Wilson, assistant secretary of Occupational Health and Safety at NIH, and Dr. Mark Klempner, the director of the BU BioLab, both testified on the merits of the new assessment before fielding questions from the Council.
Dr. John Ahearne, chair of the 10-person panel of scientists conducting the hearing, seemed to stump all parties with a basic question. After each testimonial, Ahearne asked, “How do you define ‘worst case scenario’?”
Few answers were forthcoming.
When asked for a definition of “worst case scenario,” Klempner, indicated that he would defer to the NIH. But the NIH refused to answer any questions posed by the panel.
“There are restrictions under the National Environmental Policy Act that limit what we can say,” said David Lankford, general council for the NIH. The NIH indicated it would respond to the Council’s questions later in writing.
State officials also had trouble with the question.
“There is no definition that I am aware of,” said Deerin Babb-Brott, assistant secretary of Environmental Review for the EEA. “We are not asking a question grounded in a specific definition.”
Despite the confusion over the definition of “worst case scenario,” Wilson was confident that the NIH’s risk assessment was sound. She repeatedly said that the NIH was “conservative” in its analysis of over 2500 simulations. In the assessment, the NIH used a strain of sabia virus that has not been documented and assumed person to person respiratory transmission, which also has never happened in nature. When assessing Ebola, the NIH assumed transmission via sexual exposure, although that similarly has never been documented. In comparison to other possible sites for the BioLab in Tyngsborough, MA or Peterborough, N.H, Wilson concluded that the South End was safest.
“For diseases that are worked at, there was really no difference in the number of infections across these three communities,” Wilson said.
According to the study, the South End would actually have fewer “negative outcomes” in an outbreak of Rift Valley Fever because it has a lower population of mosquitoes, which could spread the disease, than the other rural sites.
Klempner referred to the study as “robust and representative” and said that the BioLab would be equipped to handle any potential risks to safety.
“The team that is building the NEIDL [National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory] has extensive experience,” Klempner said. “All critical systems are designed to be redundant.”
Klempner also addressed fears that the BioLab will work with smallpox and conduct bioweapons research.
“We will not study smallpox and are not permitted to do that,” Klempner said. “There is a widespread misconception that we will do classified research.
Every piece of research at NEDIL will be peer reviewed and will not be classified.”
While smallpox is tightly controlled by the Center for Disease Control, Klempner acknowledged to the council that other agents, such as SARS and Avian Flu, will be studied at the BioLab.
After a short recess, BioLab opponents took the floor.
Dr. Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health, speaking on his own behalf, stated that the report failed to address worst case scenarios and that “arguably the best case scenarios are assumed.” Citing the report’s failure to account for natural strain variation, possible weaponization, genetic modification, human error and the dangers of unapproved experiments, Lipsitch said, “The model is poorly described, parameters are poorly justified, and sensitivity analyses are lacking.”
Ozonoff, a professor of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, deemed the assessment “incomplete in a troubling way and misleading.”
According to Ozonoff, the assessment’s failure to include dangerous but not BSL-4 classified diseases such as SARS and the Avian Flu was a “glaring omission” because both “agents are transmissible from person to person and likely to be present in the lab.” Furthermore, he criticized the study’s conclusion that the South End location for the project was safer than Tyngsborough or Peterborough.
“The transmission rates were not density dependent and I was unable to tell if the contact rates were density dependent,” Ozonoff said. “It seems to me that in that case the answer was pre-ordained.”
Ozonoff reserved his harshest criticism of the project when discussing the BioLab’s impact on the surrounding community, citing the negative impact the structure will have on transportation, air and noise pollution.
“[The assessment] displays a blindness and lack of concern about environmental justice communities that is rightly infuriating to them,” Ozonoff said. “The idea that neighborhood residents, who have spent years trying to organize a rational development plan, don’t care or won’t be affected by the building but suburban and rural residents will, shows a lack of empathy and insight… It is seriously incomplete, it is contrived, it is not serious and it is dismissive. And, it is wrong.”
The Council’s final report is expected by the end of November.