Foot and mouth disease funeral pyre
Posted on: July 29, 2009 7:25 AM, by revere
When the Bush Administration awarded a construction grant to put a Level 4 laboratory in Galveston, Texas to work on the most dangerous biological agents, a lot of people, including we here at Effect Measure, thought it was pretty stupid siting. Isn't Galveston open to Gulf hurricanes? Wasn't it the site of one of the most devastating storm floods in US history? Then came Hurricane Ike. It didn't seem that a hazardous agents lab could be more stupidly sited than Galveston (see here and here). That was an error in judgement on our part.
The thing about a lot of agents used in Level 4 labs is that while they are extremely dangerous if you get infected with them (Ebola is an example), most of them aren't that contagious. There may be no cure and no vaccine for them and they may be highly virulent, but they aren't that transmissible (see our post on these terms from the other day). There are some viruses that are incredibly transmissible, however. One is foot and mouth disease (FMD). This doesn't usually infect humans but it is devastating to livestock. The US lab that researched FMD was on an island (Plum Island off of Long Island, NY). That's a good precaution, because FMD has a history of getting out of even highly secure labs and infecting livestock. One of the more likely uses of bioterrorism is economic. The US reportedly has tried to do this to destabilize Cuba. The US denies it.
Read on...
