A Good Stopping Point

This is the sort of news that always brightens my day.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new $214 million infectious disease laboratory in Atlanta, scientists are conducting experiments on bioterror bacteria in a room with a containment door sealed with duct tape.

The tape was applied around the edges of the door a year ago after the building's ventilation system malfunctioned and pulled potentially contaminated air out of the lab and into a "clean" hallway.

The facility in question is a BSL-3 Q fever lab. Q fever's potential as an incapacitating agent was heavily researched during Operation Whitecoat, not least because it's extremely infectious, and hardy enough to withstand a broad range of environmental conditions. It's very unpleasant, but it's not normally fatal and it does respond to antibiotics. (Which is undoubtedly why we'd stockpiled 5,098 gallons of it by 1970. What's not to like?)

Although the CDC's position seems to be that duct tape is adequate to prevent contaminated air from circulating, they are planning to install a self-sealing door, just as soon as it's convenient:

The construction to install the new door will begin sometime between November and next April, possibly sooner, depending on when there is a good stopping point in the experiments being conducted by the Q fever scientists.

Or, I suppose, a bad stopping point...like the ones reached by UoT-San Antonio and Boston University during their work with tularemia.

Revere has lots more.

Sophisticated Sensors

An article in the Washington Post describes the controversy in NYC over the deployment of sensors that are supposed to provide early warning of a biological attack. It seems that the initial sampling equipment, which has cost about $400 million so far, leaves a lot to be desired:

The older samplers catch airborne particles in filters that are manually collected once a day and taken to a laboratory, requiring up to 30 hours to detect a pathogen. They may not preserve live organisms that scientists use to select treatment options. And the process is cost- and labor-intensive, leading to false alarms, quality-control problems and limits on the system's size, despite an $85 million-a-year national budget.

The new sensors aren't exactly ideal, either:

Runge said technical challenges remain in ensuring new sensors' accuracy and reducing their size and operating costs. He said DHS plans to begin pilot tests this year of alternative sensors -- which it hopes will be better than those made by Lawrence Livermore -- and to oversee a competition between two private bidders, IQuum and Microfluidic Systems, beginning in 2009. As a result, Runge said, decisions on what and how big a system to deploy will be left to the next administration.

That's probably just as well. It sounds as though the BioWatch system isn't in much better shape than it was back in 2005, when the EPA's inspector general announced that the EPA hadn't "ensured the reliability, timeliness and efficiency of air sampling that Bush directed be part of a $129 million early warning system."

EPA sometimes placed sensors too far apart, failed to make sure they were all in secure locations and didn't always factor in topography and seasonal wind pattern changes in some cities.

As I argued a couple of years ago, "agent detection is an interesting but comparatively minor field; it doesn't work well, but even if it did, mere data aren't all that useful unless you have a staffed and funded and organized public health system." Thanks to BushCo's technofetishist belief that every problem can be solved by paying private contractors to build some high-priced gizmo, this is precisely what we don't have:

How fast do public health departments nationwide respond to a medical practitioner's alert that a patient has a serious infectious disease like smallpox or meningitis? Or respond to a doctor who thinks he's seeing the first symptoms of anthrax from bioterrorism?....The new study found an average response time of 63 minutes, and some agencies took nearly 17 hours to call back. The report ranked one-third of the health departments as “poor” because one or more of their reply calls came more than four hours after the alert.

In her recent testimony before Congress, biosecurity expert Tara O'Toole raised a fascinating question:

Environmental sensor technologies are now being marketed to individual companies for installation in privately owned buildings. Will DHS develop commercial standards or regulations to ensure that such systems are reliable and maintained properly? Should public health agencies be required to assess every warning signal (“hit”) registered by privately owned sensors? Should public health agencies be reimbursed for such assessments?

With that in mind, read this:

The NYPD is moving to license private biological, chemical and radiological detectors because of "concerns" raised by the feds, a police official testified yesterday....

Falkenrath said the private deployment of sophisticated sensors has increased since 9/11. Information about where the sophisticated sensors are and how reliable they are is sketchy.

Opponents of licensing claim that "the measure could stifle the independent collection of environmental data," which is a valid point, especially given the official suppression of air-quality data after 9/11. But again, there's a definite limit to what data collection can do for us, given that Ayn Rand has expressly forbidden us to have a fully funded, equipped, integrated, and accessible public healthcare system.

Chemicals of Interest

If you’re like most people, you object to American colleges because they stuff students with postmodern relativism as brutally as foie gras manufacturers stuff geese with corn mash.

Sad to say, it now looks as though this is the least of our worries:

Unusual paranoia over chemical attack in the US takes many forms. It can be seen in a recent piece of trouble from the Department of Homeland Security, a long list of "chemicals of interest" it wishes to require all university settings to inventory.

"Academic institutions across the country claim they will have to spend countless hours and scarce resources on documenting very small amounts of chemicals in many different labs that are scattered across sometimes sprawling campuses," reported a recent Chemical & Engineering News, the publication of the American Chemical Society.

That’s a fair objection. The sensible way to answer it is to shriek ”9/11!” 'til your face turns as purple as an eggplant and your throat sprays a fine mist of blood.

The problem of mass shootings can be addressed by arming students, teachers, and janitors with semiautomatic weapons. But when terrorists and others malcontents equip themselves with chemical weapons, it’s a bit harder to fight fire with fire. The only possible solution – and I’m speaking as someone who has pondered this problem for at least ten minutes – is to purge our nation’s college labs of anything more dangerous than Rochelle salt.

And that definitely includes trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide:

"The manufacture of hydrogen sulfide is [simple]," writes Hutchkinson. "It is created by water coming into contact with phosphorus pentasulfide."

This is actually true, unlike many things in terrorist poison handbooks. On the DHS list, phosphorus pentasulfide is only of interest if a university has a ton of it. Hydrogen sulfide, any amount. Phosphorus pentasulfide, one ton.

While the DHS performs the important – and exciting! - work of rounding up every half-empty bottle of triethanolamine from here to West Quoddy Head, chemistry professors can concentrate on more wholesome experiments. Handled carefully, baking-soda-and-vinegar volcanoes will provoke considerable excitement - even among jaded modern students weaned on R-rated movies and “acid rock” - while teaching important lessons about fizzing, carbonation, and allied topics.

In unrelated news, there seems to be a small amount of chemical contamination in the environs of Hampton Roads, Virginia:

The military has polluted Peninsula creeks and ponds with cancer-causing chemicals and dangerous contaminants such as mercury and arsenic….At one base, an industrial solvent has been found flowing into the York River at levels almost 4,000 times the federal drinking-water limit. At another, fish skeletons have been deformed by military pollution.

And tests show elevated levels of nasty polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in fish, oysters and crabs in public waterways near three of the bases - particularly around Tabb Creek near Langley Air Force Base….

The estimates for cleanup costs range from $80 billion to $120 billion. The timeframe to finish the job is measured in multiple decades. In many cases, it takes a decade of studies before the military even begins a cleanup.

(Photo via Beaver County Militia.)

Lessons Learned

The nerve gas hydrolysate that was supposed to have been dumped into the Delaware River now seems to be headed for Port Arthur, Texas.

Mitch Osborne of Veolia Environmental Services, which won the $49 million contract, explains why local residents should rejoice:

“What will be shipped to Port Arthur is only a moderate hazard,” Osborne said. “The wastewater contains absolutely no VX. It has a high pH and an odor like a skunk because of the sulfur. But the odor is harmless….It differs very little from the wide variety of hazardous wastes managed safely at the Veolia incinerator on a daily basis.”

Nicely put, eh? Osborne should probably use some of that $49 million to hire a PR person.

Incidentally, the wastewater contains less than 20 ppb of VX. You can debate whether or not that’s a safe level, but you can’t call it “absolutely no VX.”

Veolia’s an interesting company. It’s a spin-off of Vivendi, a French company that’s very well known to people who follow the debates over water privatization and media conglomeration; Public Citizen has evocatively described it as “swirling in a maelstrom of corporate corruption and chaos.”

Apparently, its deal with the Army was reached in secret:

The Veolia deal follows two previous disposal plans — by Perma-Fix Environmental Services Inc., in Dayton, Ohio, and DuPont Co. in Deepwater, N.J. — that were scuttled by strong opposition...after the Army publicly announced its intent to contract with the two companies. But that didn't happen in the case with Veolia.

"Let's call it lessons learned," said Army spokesman Greg Mahall.

Another lesson learned, I'm guessing, has to do with the relative political clout of locals. Port Arthur is predominantly black; whites make up a mere twenty percent of its population. By an odd coincidence, it’s also one of the most polluted towns in America:

Port Arthur ranks high in just about every national pollution statistic -- the city and surrounding county are among the top 10 percent for major chemical releases; environmental cancer risk; levels of carcinogens; and levels of toxins that interfere with fetal development.

Which is ideal, since any problems the hydrolysate causes – and to be fair, it may not cause any - will be a drop in the bucket.

While we’re on the subject, the LA Times has an illuminating article on the siting of toxic facilities in minority neighborhoods:

EPA spokeswoman Jennifer Wood said the agency recognizes "that minority and/or low-income communities frequently may be disproportionately and adversely exposed to environmental harms and risks," and that the EPA attempts to address environmental justice concerns in its planning and budgeting….

That said:

President Bush's 2008 budget recommends a 28% cut in funds for such programs….

I’m glad to see that Don Imus lost his job for insulting young black people. Perhaps someday we'll stop allowing people to poison them.

The Unspoilt Beauties of Nature

Lewis Page, an 11-year veteran of the Royal Navy with significant experience in bomb disposal, describes his experience cleaning up phosgene shells in the UK countryside:

Lest anyone think the UK was hit by an enemy chemical bombardment a few years back without it making the press, I should point out that these WMDs were British. The place where I was standing was a test range, long ago. Boffins working on UK chemical weapons programmes fired thousands of gas shells into the area, showing the gay disregard for safety cases, compensation culture, and the Geneva Protocols so characteristic of the era.

Even more casually, once they were done they simply opened the range up to the public. To this day, it's a popular spot for a bracing walk among the unspoilt beauties of nature.

Page goes on to make several essential points. First, he notes that chemical weapons are not WMD unless you have a staggering amount of them (e.g., 10 or 15 tons of nerve agent), and that awestruck media reports of their lethality aren’t always based on realistic scenarios:

A single kilogram of nerve agent is said to be enough to kill 100 million people….That is actually true: but one would have to break the kilogram down into individual doses and administer them orally, without wasting so much as a tenth of a milligram. It would be far simpler to shoot one's victims or blow them up. Even strangling them barehanded would be easier. And this is generally the case with chemical weapons.

Second, the outrage over chemical weapons is morally incoherent:

Ordinary explosive rounds [can] take out a majority of unprotected people, rising to almost everyone at the high end. And in this case the protection required to survive isn't a cheap, portable suit and mask. One would want a bunker or a 30-ton armoured vehicle to withstand conventional artillery, and even then the risk of a direct hit would remain. Conventional ammunition is infinitely easier to get, store, and transport, too.

I'd actually take this line of reasoning a bit further, as I did in an earlier post:

Sometimes I wonder if a certain amount of the horror that ordinary weapons should inspire has been deflected onto chemical weapons and their ilk, as though the distinction between blowing people up and poisoning them constituted a clear and decisive line between civilization and barbarism. Chemical weapons, properly so called, are inherently of limited use on the battlefield; their real utility, perhaps, lies in their ability to make other forms of mass murder seem relatively acceptable.

Page’s final point can’t be overemphasized, especially at a time when hapless dead-enders are pointing to improvised chlorine bombs as “proof” that Iraq had WMD:

Toppling [Saddam] may or may not have been a good idea, but his possession or lack of battlefield chemical weapons shouldn't have affected anyone's thinking on the matter.

In other CW news, the Chinese are claiming that the Japanese abandoned 2 million tons of CW in China at the end of World War II. Both countries are funding a clean-up effort that’ll utilize a mobile deactivation facility.

And in the Baltic, fishermen reportedly net three tons of unexploded munitions per year, some of which contain the nerve agent tabun; the United States dumped massive quantities of these CW overboard circa 1945.

On the bright side, researchers at Hawaii’s Ordnance Reef have found that sunken munitions comprise a far better foundation for coral growth than old tires.

For the sake of perspective, it’s worth remembering that in Cambodia alone, landmines and other UXO cause an average of two casualties per day (there were 875 casualties in 2005). Much as I dislike the idea of submerged nerve agents in our coastal waters, I’d rather we devoted more of our expertise and money to landmine removal in Indochina.

(Photo of Tooele Army Depot, Utah by Douglas C. Pizac/AP, via Cryptome.)

UPDATE: Cheery news from Danger Room:

A recent study out of the Air War College calls for using chemicals as "first-use weapons against terrorists" -- part of a larger pitch to rethink the long-time pariah of military warfare....

The End is Nigh

The Guardian is shocked to learn that you can buy poison on the Internets:

Toxic chemicals such as strychnine, arsenic and cyanide are freely available for sale on the internet, leading toxicologists have warned….

To demonstrate how easy it is to buy poisons, the Guardian obtained antique flypaper infused with between 200 and 400 milligrams of arsenic from the web marketplace eBay. Arsenic-laced flypaper has been implicated in a previous murder case as a source of poison.

That “previous murder case,” the article goes on to say, involved Frederick Seddon, who poisoned one of his tenants back in 1911.

The Guardian rather glumly concedes that the arsenic it procured might not be sufficient to kill an adult, but warns that it could cause “neurological effects such as numbness and pins and needles.”

As terrifying as it is to imagine the Islamofascist hordes stocking up on antique flypaper, there’s a silver lining: We can potentially fight terrorists by outbidding them on eBay.

Of course, there’s always the danger that they’ll respond by going to the hardware store and buying some Brodifacoum, or one of the thousands of other compounds with which criminally minded underachievers can poison people.

In which case, it’s no exaggeration to say that we’re all doomed.

The Only Acceptable Outcome

As much as I'd love to be bickering over religion with everyone else, I keep getting distracted by stories like this one:

New government rules seeking to thwart terrorist attacks on chemical plants are facing stiff opposition from state leaders, environmentalists and others who say the regulations are flawed, vague and unlikely to protect the public....

In New Jersey, state lawmakers in 2005 passed stricter chemical security rules than those set to take effect at the federal level. The federal rules, however, would invalidate the New Jersey rules, in effect weakening chemical security in that state, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine says.

And this one:

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) today barred media representatives and the public from a closed-door meeting with selected lobbyists and others called to discuss legislative and regulatory changes in the troubled site remediation program....

“It does not bode well that DEP wants to develop its new toxic protection plan in secret with the usual suspects,” stated New Jersey PEER Director Bill Wolfe.

New Jersey has been a focus of post-9/11 security measures, at least in rhetorical terms, thanks to the number of people who live and work near its lengthy corridor of chemical plants. As I said a while back,

This is what James Inhofe (R-OK) sneeringly refers to as the security argument. In the looking-glass world of conservatarianism, wiretapping citizens without oversight is necessary because it might prevent a devastating attack, but enforcing chemical plant security is an intolerable infringement of fundamental American liberties.

Speaking of which, an article in Washington Monthly explains how Dick Cheney's son-in-law Philip Perry was instrumental in overriding New Jersey state law on behalf of the chemical industry:

The only acceptable outcome...would be for Washington to pass legislation giving the industry exactly what it wanted: a fig leaf of regulations to satisfy public opinion and a hidden gun that would take aim at New Jersey’s tough new regulations.

Enter Philip Perry....Perry reworked the language and helped to get it added to the spending bill in a conference committee. Under the new amendment, the DHS would have nominal authority to regulate the chemical industry but also have its hands tied where required. For example, the DHS would be barred from requiring any specific security measures, and citizens would be prohibited from suing to enforce the law. Best of all for industry, while the bill didn’t mention giving the DHS preemption authority, it didn’t bar it, either, leaving a modicum of wiggle room on the subject. In other words, if Perry was sufficiently brazen, he could claim for the DHS the power to nullify the chemical regulations in New Jersey.

He was sufficiently brazen.

The doctrine of states' rights seems to have lost a lot of its appeal for conservatarians, the high-minded rhetoric of Executive Order 12612 notwithstanding. It's one thing for a state to beat up on fags, but inconveniencing chlorine manufacturers is another thing entirely.

Enough about that, though. Anyone know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

UPDATE: Apropos of chlorine:

A truck bomb that combined explosives with chlorine gas blew up in southern Baghdad on Wednesday, and officials said it may represent a new and deadly tactic by insurgents against Iraqi civilians.

It was at least the third truck bomb in a month to employ chlorine, a greenish gas also used in World War I, which burns the skin and can be fatal after only a few concentrated breaths.