The Sunshine Project
News Release
31 October 2007Fake Forms Populate Fraudulent University of Texas Biosafety Site
Fake Texas IBC Operates in Parallel to Secret Safety CommitteeAt a glance, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) looks like it has an open and functional safety program. But appearances can be deceiving.
Prominent on UTHSCSA's website, the Environmental Health and Safety Department (http://www.uthscsa.edu/safety/) offers a well-organized set of forms and policies, interspersed with fancy graphics flashing messages about a "cleaner world" and "hazard-free work environment". Survey forms seeking input on avoiding certain types of lab accidents can be found, suggesting an active and alert program.
"The electronic bells and whistles are like makeup on a pig," says Sunshine Project Director Edward Hammond, "because the outward appearance merely disguises the ugly fact that UTHSCSA's biosafety program doesn't work as advertised. The University doesn't even use its key accident and exposure reporting forms."
Even worse, UTHSCA has a secret (and previously undisclosed) Institutional Biosafety Committee that operates in parallel to the official one that it has registered with the National Institutes of Health. Says Hammond, "UTHSCSA's secret safety committee is dangerous and intolerable. It operates beyond federal oversight and UTHSCSA's attempts to keep it a complete secret are an insult to Texans and the public in general."
FAKE FORMS: The Sunshine Project requested all copies, since 2003, of two of UTHSCSA's most important accident reporting forms: the Contaminated Sharps Injury report forms, required for use when an employee is stuck by a nonsterile needle or other similar instrument, and the Employee Exposure Notification form, required for use when employees are suspected to have been otherwise exposed to infectious agents, for example, by an aerosol or a splashed liquid.
Remarkably, UTHSCSA replied that none of either form has been submitted in the almost five years (January 2003 - present) covered by the Sunshine Project request.
UTHSCSA's reply is striking because of sharps injuries are common and because the school is also heavily invested in work with research primates, or lab monkeys, who typically carry disease or are deliberately infected for research purposes.
Sure enough, in a related request and only after substantial pressure was brought to bear, UTHSCSA belatedly acknowledged 31 workman's compensation claims filed for on the job injuries in its research labs during the same time period.
Of these accidents, 30 out of 31 involved sharps and/or monkey bites, scratches or other exposures (e.g. to blood and other bodily fluids) to its employees.
Yet the key forms of UTHSCSA's exposure control program remain unused, meaning that the school isn't doing a proper job of identifying and addressing incidents.
SECRET COMMITTEE: What's more, while all of UTHSCSA's public information refers to a single Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), in response to persistent Texas Public Information Act requests, UTHSCSA has been forced to reveal that a second, secret IBC committee also exists. IT is now fighting to keep the records of its second committee under wraps, trying to avail itself of an exemption from disclosure designed for medical records, despite the fact that the IBC oversees research and has nothing to do with health care.
UTHSCSA claims that the open IBC handles NIH-funded rDNA research. On the other hand, it is unclear what the other committee does, because the forms for both, and UTHSCSA's legal filings before the Attorney General of Texas make no rational distinction between the two. In any event, under federal rules and policy UTHSCSA should not be running "official" and "ghost" IBCs in parallel.
The only clear line between the IBCs is that UTHSCSA considers the records of one to be subject to Texas Public Information Act while the records of the other, it argues, are entirely exempt from disclosure. So secret is the second IBC that UTHSCSA won't reveal what projects it is reviewing or what other institutions it is collaborating with, although there are several, according to UTHSCSA paperwork filed with the Attorney General seeking his approval for deny public release of its records.
The Sunshine Project will contest UTHSCSA's secret IBC at both the state and federal levels. This issue will be discussed further in future news releases. A ruling by the Texas Attorney General in UTHSCSA's petition to keep its committee secret is due in December.
WHY IT MATTERS: The US is in the midst of an enormous boom in research on biological weapons agents. At the same time, advances in biotechnology such as synthetic biology are opening up new possibilities for causing harm, deliberate or accidental. Again and again, US biodefense and other labs have insisted that they have safeguards in place to protect the public from both accidents and deliberate acts.
Frequently, IBCs figure prominently in this alleged safety net. Yet, upon closer examination, IBCs and biodefense lab safety and security programs in the United States have again and again turned out to be more smoke and mirrors than reality. They have also all too frequently resisted the transparency necessary to ensure safety and promote international confidence in the activities and goals of US research with biological weapons agents.
The Sunshine Project, among other expert organizations, has called upon the federal government to constrain the biodefense boom and to tighten federal oversight of laboratories. For more information on the big picture of lab expansion and oversight failures, please see the Sunshine Project's testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee of October 2007: http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte_mtgs/110-oi-hrg.100407.Hammond-testimony.pdf
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