No Room for Error
In spite of what my wife thinks when she looks over at my desk, I’m a pretty organized person. I work within the realm of what I call “organized chaos,” in which there aren’t necessarily “piles” of paper on my desk but really one big “pile” in which everything resides. Contrary to logic, though, I know exactly where everything is, and it drives much more organized people, like my wife, nuts.
Oh, now I’m not saying that I don’t lose a thing or two on occasion, but it’s the rare exception; in fact, I’d be willing to bet that the organized people out there occasionally misplace something, big or small. It’s our nature as humans to not always have a complete grasp on where everything in our lives might be, and the problem is exacerbated when you have a combination of the two different types of people together, as you would in a business, government, or some other organized group. This, however, is why redundancy and backup plans are vital, especially when dealing with material that might be of utmost importance.
Because of this logic, I’m unable to understand how American laboratories handling the world’s deadliest germs and toxins have somehow managed more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003. According to an Associated Press report by Larry Margasak, no one died and there was no public risk during this period, but it nevertheless raises questions about the safety procedures in place at these high-security labs. The material itself warrants particular care, some of the organisms and poisons so deadly that no cure exists for those infected by them (think: Anthrax, Ebola and Smallpox to name a few). If you’d like to see the whole article, click here.
According to the AP report, the labs doing work with these diseases reported 36 accidents and lost shipments during 2007 so far, nearly double those reported in 2004. This is actually in direct proportion with the number of labs approved by the government to handle the deadliest substances since 2004, which now stands at 409. That said, however, we’re not talking about production of a cell phone, or autos, or computers, we’re talking about the production and study of aggressive diseases that could wipe out entire regions in months, even weeks.
Authorities are concerned that though we’ve been lucky so far and no outbreaks have occurred yet, one may not be far off. As one Republican Senator put it:
“It may be only a matter of time before our nation has a public health incident with potentially catastrophic results,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee. Stupak’s panel has been investigating the lab incidents and will conduct a hearing Thursday.
Though nothing catastrophic has occurred to people yet, lab accidents have had an effect on the outside world, writes Margasak. In England, the health and safety agency said that an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in livestock earlier this year was likely the result of a leaking pipe at a British lab manufacturing a vaccine for it. Authorities were forced to suspend the export of hooved livestock and their products, which carry the disease, and destroy them. In this case, the impact was purely economic, but the greater concern is whether a more serious mistake could lead to more serious losses, such as loss of human life.
I did some work at a large life insurance company for a time that had initiated an effort to prepare contingencies should an Avian Flu epidemic befall the United States, and it directed its departments for plans to cope with such an outbreak. I remember seeing the signs appear in the men’s bathrooms indicating the importance of washing your hands properly, and reciting the alphabet while lathering your hands was the only way to ensure you were truly clean. I imagined then that the outbreak would likely come from an infected but unwitting passenger entering the country from an intercontinental flight. I had not imagined a possibility where the disease might come from the place charged with preventing it or developing a cure.
What’s more worrisome to me are the indications that some accidents go unreported, such that the ability to control the impact might be compromised. The article indicates that until this year, Texas A&M’s laboratory failed to report one case of a Brucella bacteria infection that occurred last year. In 2005, the FBI investigated the Public Health Research Institute in Newark, NJ, when 3 mice used in an experiment with plague bacteria disappeared. Other previously undisclosed accidents are listed on the site, a scary indicator that perhaps whatever measures in place now at these organizations is not enough to ensure the safety of the public is ensured.
100 accidents since 2003 isn’t a lot. However, I’m not willing to bet my life, or my family’s life, on those statistics. All it takes is a single mistake to let a disease loose of epidemic proportions, and therefore 0 errors is the only acceptable level of risk for these labs. Multiple contingency plans should be in place to ensure our safety. As I mentioned in the beginning, I’m not the most organized of people, and I certainly understand that people can sometimes make mistakes. But my mortgage payment at the bottom of a pile is a lot less dangerous than an incurable disease that walks out of a lab because someone carried out a petri dish at the bottom of their pile of take-home work.
What do you think?
