Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and biodefense critic said today the power loss last month at the CDC's new high-security research lab in Atlanta could have exposed researchers to dangerous diseases.

The $214 million Building 18, opened two years ago, houses labs for

Biosafety Level 2, 3 and 4 research. Among the pathogens studied in

BSL-3 are anthrax and the SARS virus. BSL-4 labs are designed to handle the most lethal organisms known to man, including the Ebola and Marburg viruses. No cure exists for BSL-4 diseases; fortunately, the BSL-4

space at Building 18 isn't yet operational. The others, however, are. Ebright said:

In BSL-2, one works in an air-filtered biocontaiment cabinet. If the power goes out, the filter fails. In BSL-3, one works inside a cabinet inside a room with negative air pressure. Both cease when power fails.

If there had been BSL-4 in effect, they would have lost the negative air pressure in that as well.

The CDC isn't saying what they're working with, it but probably includes the 1918 influenza virus, H5N1 avian influenza, and certainly anthrax and plague. It would have gotten more play anywhere else, but the agency responsible for investigating was CDC itself. It's too early to know if there were infections. This would count as exposure.... This wouldn't be acceptable at a small company or university lab, and was astonishing for lab working with 1918 influenza.

In this in this Atlanta Journal Constitution story, CDC officials downplayed the importance of the outage , caused by a lightning strike that overloaded a circuit breaker in the lab. The building wasn't equipped with its own backup generator, instead relying on what is now an obviously imperfect connection to backups on the CDC's research campus.

Wired Science recently covered the CDC's decision to halt biodefense research at Texas A&M University, where carelessness led to worker infections that were subsequently covered. With biodefense research booming around the nation, the danger of accidental infections and outbreaks is significant – yet only guidelines, rather than formal laws, dictate how labs should be built and research conducted. That, said Ebright, needs to be fixed – quickly.

Update Building 18 (scroll down) [CDC]

Image: CDC*