Ross Heath, chair of the University of Washington's Faculty Senate, had alarming news for his colleagues at their Monday night, January 10, executive committee meeting. The university, he said, had submitted a grant proposal to the federal government to build a Regional Biocontainment Laboratory--a facility to research "Category A, B, and C" bioterrorism agents and diseases--without notifying the campus community. "These categories, by the way, include everything from anthrax to viral hemorrhagic fever, which includes… Ebola," Heath said at the meeting.
UW will find out by September if they've secured the grant, and the lab could be up and running by 2009.
News of the proposal upset Heath, other members of the Faculty Senate (the faculty's legislative body), and neighbors who've heard about it. While some, like Heath, have no objections to a state-of-the-art bioterrorism research lab, people are angry that university officials haven't announced the controversial project to the public.
"A request like this went out of the university to a federal agency without any process," Heath complains. "I think most people [at Monday's meeting] were a little astounded and outraged."
A second major concern, Heath explains, is that the UW's proposal calls for building the lab near Portage Bay, on Boat Street--not far from busy University Way and the UW Medical Center. If bioterrorism agents or diseases were to somehow get out of the building, the proximity to the water, the campus, and nearby neighborhoods could pose a huge safety problem. Matt Fox, head of the University District Community Council, and co-chair of the City-University-Community Advisory Committee, says the Community Council is "profoundly troubled." "[It] represents a far greater and likelier threat to Seattle's public safety than the extremely remote possibility of a terrorist attack with anthrax or other biological or chemical agents," he says.
The School of Medicine's spokesperson, Tina Mankowski, says the university is about to begin discussions with the campus and the community. Mankowski says the facility won't house Ebola or anthrax. Instead, the lab would deal with level-3 materials like gram-negative bacteria, or plague "And it's going to be built with a number of safety precautions," explains Theresa Doherty, UW's Assistant Vice President for Regional Affairs, who also says the site selection is preliminary.
