Galveston UTMB Handles Deadliest Viruses
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.