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University of Washington bends biosafety.

Article Excerpt
Sunshine Project, July 2004. As more laboratories begin to handle genetically-recreated 1918 "Spanish" Flu [1] and similar flu strains, the chances that a lab will be the source of the next global influenza pandemic increase.

The skyrocketing biodefense budget, now exceeding that of the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation), is rapidly increasing research on biological weapons agents, including risky genetic engineering projects. Despite this, the Bush administration maintains that comprehensive laboratory safety and disclosure law is unnecessary, because an alleged "culture of responsibility" among institutional biosafety committees will protect Americans, and the world, from its biodefense research.

But at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose scientists are eager to handle 1918 Spanish Flu, the IBC's judgment is unsound. It has approved experiments by summarily changing the containment level of a planned lab, using inappropriate safety benchmarks, and unilaterally lowering the safety threshold required for work with the potentially pandemic virus.

In its heyday decades ago, 1918 influenza killed ten, perhaps twenty million people worldwide. The 1918 flu was recently brought back to life by scientists from the US Departments of Defense and Agriculture and private institutions including the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Digging through archives of medical samples and, literally, digging up the dead, the team's work resulted in the re-emergence--in the lab--of one of the most dreaded diseases in human...