Sterilizers & Autoclaves News

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is an atypical form of pneumonia that first appeared in November 2002 in Guangdong Province, China.

A laboratory technician working for China’s national disease control and prevention center has been blamed for the recent outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) earlier this year.

Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi addressing a meeting on the issue said China would step up its efforts to formulate laws and regulations on laboratory bio-safety, and improve work conditions for researchers to protect their health and safety and prevent the spread of disease.

The Vice-Premier went on to say that the accident, not only impaired people’s health, but also had caused a detrimental effect on the economy.

Officials after a through investigation said poor lab safety management and irregular operations by professionals resulted in the pollution of a laboratory. The SARS virus infected few of the laboratory staff members; this constitutes a major accident due to negligence and poor safety methods implemented in the laboratory.

The Diarrhea Virus Laboratory under the Institute of Virus Diseases of the center was found to have conducted SARS virus research. It implemented untested methods to kill the virus in an ordinary lab, according to the report.

According to the report on investigation, the lab failed to report to higher authorities the fact when unusual health conditions were detected among some of their staff members.

The Ministry of Health has accepted the resignation of the director and a vice-director of China’s National Disease control and Prevention Center.

After the People’s Republic of China suppressed all news of the outbreak both internally and abroad, it spread rapidly, reaching neighboring Hong Kong and Vietnam in late February 2003, and then to other countries via international travel of infected persons.

Anthrax, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Human Immuno deficiency (HIV), are some of the viral outbreaks that shook the world. There are even more deadliest virus and have so much power to infect and kill that scientists are required to use thumbprints to access them in the lab and spacesuits to handle them.

The Galveston UTMB lab, a specialized laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch is now getting ready to host some of these viruses. Officials promise the lab will be secure from both leaks, in and out. This made the children’s hospital across the street and the popular Stewart Beach less than a mile from the $15.5 million lab, housed in a nondescript building on the UTMB campus, comfort, when the officials promised to secure the lab from leaks.

Just a handful of labs in the Western Hemisphere can the world’s most dangerous biological materials. These are named as Biosafety Level 4 viruses by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But when the UTMB lab receives final certification from the CDC it will still be behind the CDC lab in Atlanta and an Army research lab in Fort Detrick, Md., to handle emergency research in the United States caused due to a bioterror attack or a naturally occurring epidemic.

U.S. health officials say the extra space is desperately needed to study emerging and infectious diseases cropping up around the world. The current intelligence reports suggesting a future terrorist threat with weapons of mass destruction support these needs. Some U.S. terrorism experts fear the virus could be isolated from natural sources and, with a fair amount of expertise, be made into an aerosol spray. The government realized the sense of urgency about bioterrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and has been spending $1.7 billion a year on biodefense.

Inside UTMB’s 2,000-square-foot lab, scientists will try to understand the structure of the viruses, and then figure out how they grow and act. The dozen or so researchers in the lab also will help develop field tests to rapidly detect the viruses, work to identify drugs to combat them and try to produce vaccines. Ramon Flick, an assistant professor of pathology at UTMB who will direct operations in the lab.

It is easier to take something and make a weapon out of it than to make a vaccine or therapeutic for it. This research is painstaking, but every bit of knowledge helps. Doing this work will be a cumbersome process. Scientists must pass several guard stations and swipe multiple coded cards to get into the building and another to gain access to the general area of the lab. At the lab’s entrance it takes a thumbprint and yet another card swipe to gain admittance. The labs environment can be intimidating.

Once inside, they get into pressurized suits hooking it to the air system and then enter the lab. There is enough air in the lab for six people, and working places for four. Rarely you will find more than four people in the lab. After a shift of about four hours, the researchers will exit the lab to a large shower to be sprayed first with chemicals, and then with water. After taking off the suit they shower again, before leaving the lab.

Few of the world’s most dangerous viruses other than Ebola and smallpox are household names, but they’re all nasty bugs and poorly understood aside from a few basic facts. Some eat the body from within. Most can jump from human to human. Nearly all are potential weapons of terror.

One that virus researchers will begin working with immediately is Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, which occurs naturally in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe and has a human mortality rate of 30 to 50 percent

By international law, the CDC lab in Atlanta and a Russian lab have limitations on handling smallpox, but Galveston is off limits. In the absence of national emergency, the researchers will be free to pursue their research on any of the eight viruses on the CDC’s list, from Hantavirus to Lassa to Marburg for which they can obtain federal grants.

Even with precautions, from high-pressure systems keeping air particles confined to the innermost part of the lab the work remains a dangerous game that easily sparks public concern. Such fears have prompted protests in other cities where BSL-4 labs were proposed.

UTMB officials have been educating the public about BSL-4 labs, and their safety measures, since 1997. Galveston Mayor Roger “Bo” Quiroga has been openly supportive. No appreciable opposition has emerged to the UTMB research.

Health officials say BSL-4 labs are safer than hospital labs because they are so tightly controlled. The new UTMB lab is designed to be a bunker within a building. And under natural disaster, the first floor of the UTMB building has a 12-foot buffer against a storm surge, and in advance of a potential storm’s landfall, the materials would be locked away in protective areas called autoclaves, keep the organism in, and everything else out.

The U.S. cattle industry was under threat when the mad cow disease was first discovered in the state of Washington. But regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture assured that they’re doing every thing necessary to protecting from the ravages of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

These statements are unreliable since the efforts that are put in, to control the spread of these deadly disease are not encouraging. Generally the tainted meat that is for eating comes from large corporate farms having over 4000 animals. At these farms animals lack personal attention and care. They are treated as milk machines.

Generally, a cow needs 15 minutes to give all their milk. But in corporate farms, animals are hooked up to milking machines with timers on them for four minutes. If the cow under performs, it gets added to the list of animals headed for the slaughterhouse. The average life span of a corporate cow is 2 to 4 years. Cows don’t even reach their full growth until they’re 5 years old, when they hit their prime and give the most milk. The waste is simply unimaginable

Now, it takes about five to seven years for symptoms of BSE to appear in an infected cow. But most corporate dairy farms are sending their abused, used-up, broken-down cows off to the slaughterhouse at younger and younger ages — before they reach the key 5-year-old mark. No adequate amount of testing done to make the meat supply safe.

Experts confirmed that there have been cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human form of spongiform encephalopathy in the United States. But in practice, every year, 300 new cases of CJD are diagnosed in the U.S. It’s a diagnosis of elimination. After a person comes down with the symptoms, he or she is tested for a variety of neurological disorders. The only way to test for it is by removing brain tissue and examining it under a microscope after the patient has already died. Autopsies are never performed for two simple reasons: it’s expensive to do, and the fear of catching the disease from infected brain tissue.

In the slaughterhouse the brain and spinal cord of the Mabton cow were ripped out of the cow’s carcass by an inefficient machine that often doesn’t recover all the neurological tissue. The machine routinely leaves behind spinal cord tissue to be ground into hamburger, sausage and other products for human consumption.

Yet a man in Britain recently died from CJD that he contracted from a blood transfusion. The blood of infected cattle cannot be ruled out, hence, in muscle cuts like steaks and roasts. BSE is not a bacteria or virus; it’s a prion, a very simple, extremely durable protein that can’t be killed by freezing or extreme heat. So, cooking doesn’t solve the problem.

Before 1997, the USDA was put in charge of inspecting feed mills to make sure they comply with the ban on feed with infected cattle tissue, but its enforcement powers have been gutted by successive federal budget cuts and the enforcing agency went into the hands of the culprits. There are as many as a dozen feed mills here in Washington have been caught violating safety laws, but the USDA failed in controlling them.

The USDA says that, if downer cows are tested at the slaughterhouse, meat can be recalled. The Mabton cow’s carcass was processed for food, sent to distributors and grocery stores, and was almost certainly cooked and eaten before the results of its BSE tests were completed and announced to the public. How could the meat be recalled back after consumption? That’s how our mechanized, inhuman, non-regulated corporate food supplies system works.

Neither democrats nor Republicans seem to understand this basic concept, or even care about the problem. Both parties have supported bills in Congress that throw money into the pockets of corporate agribusiness at the expense of small family farms. The government encouraged this by offering more subsidies and there by gut the safety of the food supply and throws the small family farmers out of the business.

It’s time for a change — a big change. A ban on slaughtering downer cows is only a first step. We need to ban subsidies to corporate agribusiness. We need initiatives that support family farms, which provide debt relief to overtaxed small farmers. We need to extend the subsidies to the kind of “technology” that small farmers can’t afford but corporate farms use regularly to increase their output, like bovine growth hormone, cloning and genetically modified organisms. We need the kind of price supports that keep small farms in business, but don’t encourage large corporate farms to add more and more capacity out of greed and the need to please their shareholders.

Those changes won’t come soon, but they must come eventually. In the meantime, be careful what you eat. Eat local, eat organic, and buy from your neighborhood farmer’s market. It’s little expensive, but you get what you pay for, and you don’t want to be paying for BSE.