Word: detrick
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Building 550 is an unprepossessing two-story, barracks-like structure in the U.S. Army's old chemical and germ warfare center at Fort Detrick. Md. Next week it will become the site of an important experiment. Converted at a cost of $250,000, the facility has been certified by the National Institutes of Health as the nation's first P-4 laboratory, where the riskiest genetic research now permitted by the NIH can be conducted. The lab's initial test will attempt to answer two vital questions: Can recombinant DNA research create dangerous organisms...
...sealed environment, airlocks, decontamination systems, showers for workers after experiments, and sealed cabinets accessible only through attached gloves. Some "worst case" experiments, involving animal tumor viruses, will begin in the trailer this summer. NIH is also converting some of the abandoned germ-warfare labs at Maryland's Fort Detrick into similar super-containment facilities. In addition to the labs, the guidelines require the use of the self-destructing, escape-proof microbes for certain higher-risk experiments...
...come to the most important point of all: the enormous difference between the danger of causing a laboratory infection and the further danger of unleashing an epidemic. In Camp Detrick, working for 25 years on the most communicable and virulent pathogens known, 423 laboratory infections were seen, most caused by respiratory pathogens. Yet there was not a single case of secondary spread to any person outside the laboratory. Similarly, in the Communicable Disease Center of the U.S. Public Health Service 150 laboratory infections were recorded, with one case of transmission to a relative. Elsewhere in the world there have been...
...been lost. The Cambridge Experimentation Review Board should recommend that there be a debate held on the federal level about the ethics of recombinant DNA and genetic engineering. At the same time the council should vote that all research should be conducted at a single site, such as Fort Detrick, the former biological warfare laboratory, for several years so the results of the experimentation can be observed without high risk. The scientists' experiments should be open to public scrutiny, and the goals of the researchers arrived at by public debate...
...Weedham Report, prepared at the request of the NIH, found that there have been 423 infections and three deaths in the last 25 years of operation under the most careful containment conditions at the Fort Detrick labs for study of viruses. Weedham concluded in his reports, "In the absence of effective vaccination, it is impossible to do basic research on a highly infective agent without laboratory infections...