Homestead mailing list

["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

But did the "exhuming" crew wear all that necessary gear ?

Not bloody likely .... the bodies have been dug up but only *now*

are they "considering" under what level bio-security to *work*

on them .... 



1918 killer flu virus to be tested in UW lab
By TOM PAULSON
The Seattle Post Intelligencer
September 18, 2004



Seattle, WA - University of Washington scientists plan to infect monkeys with 
a killer flu virus grown from tissue exhumed from victims of the 1918 
epidemic.

They hope the insight they gain will unravel the mystery of why tens of 
millions of people worldwide died from the virulent flu strain and lead to 
development of better vaccines and drugs that may save lives in the future.

"This was the most deadly infectious disease in the history of mankind, 
killing at least 40 million people," said Dr. Michael Katze, a UW 
microbiologist and principal investigator for the local arm of the project.

"To this day, nobody understands why the virus was so deadly." 

Most experts believe another killer flu pandemic is overdue, Katze said, so 
it's critical to gain information about the disease.

The UW received part of a $12.7 million grant, funded largely from Congress' 
$1.7 billion biodefense appropriation to the National Institutes of Health, 
to collaborate on the 1918 flu study with Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 
New York and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. 

A skeptic of resurrecting and enlivening the 1918 flu virus, however, said it 
is critical to first make sure we are adequately protected against creating a 
"man-made" pandemic. 

"This project could create a new bug that infects someone in the lab who then 
walks out at the end of the day and, literally, kills tens of millions of 
people," said Ed Hammond, director of a biotechnology and bioweapons watchdog 
organization called the Sunshine Project, based in Austin, Texas.

Although Hammond said he could accept the noble intentions of the UW 
scientists, he noted that there are no national laboratory standards for 
dealing with this particular virus.

The lack of regulatory protection, he said, stems from the fact that 
influenza is generally regarded as a fairly routine disease. 

"But this organism, the 1918 virus, is something else," Hammond said. "It's 
very dangerous and easily spread." 

He contended that the 1918 virus deserves one of the highest levels of 
laboratory containment systems, known as Biosafety Level 3 Ag -- so-called 
because the criteria were set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The only greater level of protection (in which lab workers don self-contained 
"moon suits" inside a pressurized, air-locked, multilayered lab) is Biosafety 
Level 4.

The first step in this project will be to spend about $300,000 of the grant 
to beef up the biosafety levels of protection at the Seattle facility, said 
Dr. William Morton, director of the regional primate research center at the 
UW. 

"We do need to have an elevated level of containment," Morton said.

The lab facilities, which are primarily used today for HIV research involving 
primates, are built to Biosafety Level 2. 

But Morton said it's not clear that the 1918 flu study will require all the 
Biosafety Level 3 Ag protections.

He said the plan is to create an "enhanced" level 3 lab on one floor of the 
primate center, located in a non-descript research building in Belltown. 

The difference between a routine Biosafety Level 3 lab and the Biosafety 
Level 3 Ag lab is significant. Only the latter has an air-lock entry, a 
system for decontaminating wastewater and various other filters or devices 
aimed at minimizing the spread of infectious disease.

Morton said the precise design for converting the lab would depend upon 
recommendations from the NIH.

Karen Van Dusen, UW director of environmental health and safety, said Hammond 
is correct that there are no agreed-upon laboratory standards for dealing 
with the 1918 flu virus.

"Our situation here is very similar to the early days of the AIDS epidemic, 
figuring out how to safely deal with HIV," Van Dusen said. 

This is because the 1918 virus had disappeared after the outbreak.

Viral DNA was recovered a few years ago from the exhumed bodies of those 
killed in the pandemic. Most of the DNA came from those who had died in 
northern latitudes where the permanently frozen ground had preserved viral 
DNA. 

Scientists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and at Mount Sinai led 
some of the expeditions to dig up the 1918 victims and genetically 
reconstitute the virus. 

"We intend to be very cautious," Van Dusen said. "No matter what standard 
comes out, we intend to meet or exceed it" -- unless the recommendation is 
Biosafety Level 4. "If they're going to require a Biosafety Level 4, we won't 
do this," she said. 

Katze has already been working with non-infectious, genetic fragments of the 
1918 flu virus. He and his colleagues have shown that the macaque monkeys 
develop infections similar to that of humans and should provide excellent 
animal models for trying to decipher this killer bug's mode of operation. 

Katze's team will seek to learn more about the nature of the 1918 flu by 
inserting key genes from the killer flu into a common flu strain. The flu 
virus has only eight genes, said Katze, so they hope to rapidly target which 
genes are most responsible for virulence. The monkeys will be euthanized 
weeks after being infected, the UW scientists said, to allow for tissue, 
cellular and genetic testing.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or 
tompaulson AT seattlepi.com