Rural Montana Prepares for Major Bio Defense Lab

Typography
Montana's Bitterroot Valley, surrounded by mountains, has long offered a respite from the modern world, an area of small-town values with rivers beloved by fishermen and a thriving log cabin business.

HAMILTON, Montana — Montana's Bitterroot Valley, surrounded by mountains, has long offered a respite from the modern world, an area of small-town values with rivers beloved by fishermen and a thriving log cabin business.


The bucolic setting between two mountain ranges in western Montana will soon host one of the nation's few biowarfare defense labs, a controversial $66.5 million building where scientists will research dangerous pathogens in an effort to stem deadly attacks.


"It's an unfortunate mission, but unfortunately it's a necessity, especially after 9/11," said Joe Petrusaitis, mayor of Hamilton, pop. 4,400. "The community mostly supported it, but we did have detractors."


Scientists came to the Bitterroot Valley early in the 20th century to study the outbreak of an often fatal disease which came to be called Rocky Mountain spotted fever.


In 1928, some in the local community sued to prevent the building of what became the Rocky Mountain Laboratories. To calm local fears, the lab agreed to build a long-since demolished and never-used moat around its buildings to bar disease-carrying ticks from spreading.


In later years it worked on numerous infectious diseases including Lyme disease and prion diseases, a type of disease that includes so-called mad cow disease; today it is part of the network of U.S. infectious disease labs with 250 workers.


With white-coated scientists behind closed doors, the Rocky Mountain Lab created an mysterious aura, perhaps heightened by a suspicion of government strong in much of the U.S. West.


"Until around 2000, the lab did not do as good a job at promoting its research program as it does now," said Marshall Bloom, who became the lab director in 2002. "In the local community, there was a lot of concern."


That concern intensified with the announcement of biodefense plans that would involve staff wearing space-age contamination suits in airtight labs. The new facility should be ready next year with biodefense work scheduled for 2007.


"It is a logical extension of what had gone on here virtually 100 years," Bloom said.


RENOUNCING BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS


The United States unilaterally renounced biological weapons in 1969, a commitment fixed by treaty in 1972.


The Clinton administration boosted germ warfare defenses in the late 1990s. Since 2001, Washington has spent billions more on fighting germs such as anthrax and plague and has announced plans to add to the nation's four existing Biosafety Level-4 biodefense facilities.


The Rocky Mountain Labs would become the only such facility in the American West, an expansion that prompted a lawsuit seeking to block the construction.


"Folks were concerned about the lab being some sort of target of bioterrorism," said Alexandra Gorman, science director at Women's Voices for the Earth. "People were concerned about agents of bioterrorism that they were working on in the lab getting out into the community."


Mary Wulff of the Coalition for a Safe Lab said the lab once failed to account for a bag of radioactive waste and had dumped chemicals into a nearby landfill in the 1980s. "The BL-4 (Biosafety Level-4) building boom was a knee-jerk reaction by our government after 9/11," she said.


Lab director Bloom declined to say whether he thought Washington was overreacting to a remote danger of bioterrorism, but said anthrax and viruses that occurred in nature should be studied. "If you look at the list of all the causes of emerging and re-emerging disease ... the intentional introduction of infectious disease is pretty low down on the list," he said.


Some experts also caution that biodefense skates close to banned offensive bioweapons research. "We have to understand what the virus' tricks are ...to treat or defend against it," Bloom said.


A year after the lawsuit, the lab settled by agreeing to a series of safety enhancements. State politicians are also on board and say the lab expansion will help the local economy.


"There's been some folks in the local community that are not happy having a facility there. I think that that is maybe an overreaction," Gov. Brian Schweitzer said in an interview. "It's a high-tech employer and we need more of those in Montana, not less."


Hamilton Mayor Petrusaitis said he had more pressing worries.


Lab officials say five workers died from infections they contracted from 1910-1925. The last disease-related death stemming from the lab occurred in World War Two, and germs from the lab have never affected area outsiders, lab officials say.


"You could die from the flu much more easily," Petrusaitis said. "I am more worried about the rogue alcoholic driving downtown."


Source: Reuters