NEIDL safety and training exercises planned for late summer/early fall
By Brandon Simes (From South End News), July 1, 2009
Researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) on Albany Street will participate in simulated safety and training exercises beginning in late summer/early fall and continuing for six to eight months, the Boston University Medical Center (BUMC) announced on June 24. The simulations will not use any live research agents, and research will not be conducted at any point during the training.
“While the legal and regulatory issues on the use of the facility for biosafety research continue, we will use this time to train and familiarize research and safety personnel with the NEIDL,” said Mark Klempner, principal investigator for the NEIDL. “We will re-enact a research project and all its processes and ensure that our standard operating procedures are appropriate and that our researchers and our community will be appropriately protected.”
The exact starting date remains undetermined, said BUMC spokesperson Ellen Berlin.
“It has to do with people’s schedules, and what they’re going to do. …I suspect it’s going to be late August,” she said.
The first phase of the training will involve only internal NEIDL and BUMC personnel, and Berlin believes the exercises will not have a great effect on South Enders’ day-to-day lives.
“I think it will be not noticeable,” she said of the initial phase; in the two later phases external personnel, including police, fire, and other first responder agencies, will enter the equation.
The trainings were originally scheduled to take place earlier in the year, but like the results of the risk assessment study by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Blue Ribbon Panel of independent experts on the NEIDL’s viability as a Level 4 lab in the urban environment of the South End, the exercises were delayed. The specifics of the trainings have not changed substantially, however.
“It’s really just the timing that’s changed,” said Berlin.
The exercises will focus on replicating the results of published research to ensure that protocol will be correctly followed and that the established protocol is appropriate. The simulations will act as “dress rehearsals of each step in the process that led to acquiring the data that resulted in the published research,” according to the June 24 release, which also called the planned exercises “some of the most comprehensive biosafety trainings ever simulated in a laboratory environment combined with the most extensive participation of internal and external personnel in a facility of this kind in the U.S.”
Activity reports, which will describe the goings-on inside the facility for the public, will be posted regularly on the official NEIDL website, www.bu.edu/NEIDL. The NEIDL has received a temporary Certificate of Occupancy by the Boston Inspectional Services Department for the trainings.
Construction on the facility began in March 2006 and was substantially completed in August of last year. The $198 million facility is jointly funded by the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, a part of NIH and Boston University.