This story has been big in the news lately.  As you probably have already heard, the person who sent anthrax spores (Bacillus anthracis) through the mail has commited suicide.  The culprit is army scientist Bruce Ivins.

Ivins worked with Anthrax in order to develop a vaccine, so one might think this is hypocritical to his work.  However, current investigations lead us to beleive that Ivins was psychologically disturbed.  Prosecuters speculate that Ivins was hoping to incense the public awareness of anthrax and hopefully get more funding.  I guess scientists will go a long way to get research grants these days, but this is a new low.

My concern is how this event will ultimately change things for microbiologists and infectious disease researchers (a community I consider myself a part of).  My lab doesn’t have anthrax, but we do have plenty of other deadly infectious diseases like Francisella tulerensis (tularemia), Yersinia pestis (bubonic plauge) and Borellia (Lyme’s disease).

Will researchers now have to get psych evals before we’re allowed to work with pathogens?  Are intitutions going to tighten security, make us take even more safety classes, hire guards to check bags and not let us work alone? I hate to be the one to point this out, but it wouldn’t be exactly difficult to take pathogens out of the lab and even undergrads are given keys to the labs.

I have to sacrifice ease of access for security, but maybe the risks aren’t worth it? It just takes one incident to ruin it for the rest of us.

Perhaps (and hopefully) I’m wrong, and this will blow over as a unique incident, but it wouldn’t surprise me if universities, national and armed forces labs will at least start to discuss greater security measures.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 12:23 pm and is filed under medicine, microbiology, musings, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.