Federal regulators have given Boston University approval to open an infectious disease research lab in the South End, potentially opening the doors for BU's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories to test deadly bacteria and diseases like Anthrax and the Ebola virus.
The National Institutes of Health stamp of approval is another earmark on the timeline of the 11-year battle between South End residents and Boston University. It’s been a bitter war, one that pits the potential for groundbreaking disease discovery against the public safety of its neighbors. The latest assessment from the NIH gives the university a leg up, saying the biolab, "poses minimal risk to the community."
Klare Allen, Community Organizer for Roxbury Safety Net and the Stop the Bioterror Lab Coalition says that “minimal risk” is not good enough.
“The minimal risk, of course, is not acceptable. How can you have minimal risk with a population of 23,000 that live right next door to the lab that will be researching aerosol deadly pathogens? So just even not being scientific, it doesn’t make any sense. That’s the terminology that BU wants to use but the community is not stupid," Allen said.
John Murphy, Interim Director of the BU Biolab maintains the safety level of the lab. Still, there is no such thing as zero risk.
“One can never say there is absolutely no risk. So the descriptor of the quantification of the risk is really a semantic argument. In the document that was just issued--you’ll see that the likelihood of an environment release is something on the order of once every 100,000 years all the way up to once in a million years," Murphy said.
NEIDL still faces legal hurdles as it will need to seek approval from both federal and state authorities to attain bio-safety levels 3 and 4 status. BU opened a section of the 192,000 square foot lab last March to work on level 2 germs, like tuberculosis, which are less dangerous.
