Defense agency's effort to secure Soviet pathogens grows
Goal is to create disease surveillance network in former Soviet republics.
A U.S. program to secure and catalog biological agents at former Soviet laboratories has moved forward quickly in recent years, with increased cooperation from five former Soviet republics speeding progress, U.S. Defense Department officials said this week.
The United States has been working closely with the governments of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan to consolidate dangerous pathogens stored at "antiplague" sites, Scott Levac, manager of the Threat Agent Detection Response program at the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said at a briefing Tuesday. The goal is to create a disease surveillance network for each nation and consolidate biological agents to no more than three sites in each country, reducing the chance that terrorists would acquire the pathogens.
To date, 11 institutes for consolidating pathogens have been established in the five countries. These "central reference laboratories" are former antiplague laboratories converted for use in the program by the United States and the governments of former Soviet states, with the two sides splitting the cost.
The program has also engaged former Soviet scientists with biological weapons expertise by offering them work in the new facilities.
"We have really gone out of our way not only to engage individuals but the [research] organizations" inside each country, Levac said.
The United States expects to spend around $400 million on the program over the next five years, said Jim Reid, director of Cooperative Threat Reduction policy at the Pentagon. He added that close cooperation with the former republics has allowed the budget to grow significantly from the $2 million set aside in 1998.
Cooperation has "allowed us to kind of develop the system in an environment that was supportive of what we were trying to do," he said.
Reid also said that Threat Agent Detection Response is not taking place within Russia. "Significant policy differences" and disagreements over certification requirements have stopped work on the program between Moscow and Washington, he said without elaborating on disagreements over policy or certification.
Top-to-Bottom Cooperation
The Threat Agent Detection Response program is using some former Soviet antiplague sites as bases of operation. The Soviet Union established the sites in order to detect and respond to disease outbreaks, Levac said.
Experts consider the facilities to be public health and proliferation risks, as they contain agents such dangerous pathogens as anthrax, bubonic plague and tularemia. One of the primary goals of the program is to improve security at the antiplague sites in which such agents are being consolidated and to collect dangerous agents from shuttered laboratories before they fall into the hands of terrorists.
All consolidation facilities must meet U.S. Biosafety Level 2 or 3 security standards, which require sufficient security to protect agents that present risks to workers and the public.
Levac said the program functions on three levels - local, regional and state. Experts at the local level are trained to recognize and respond to disease outbreaks. These experts would report any outbreaks to the central reference laboratories, which would then dispatch teams of epidemiologists to respond.
Sentinel stations have been established at the regional level, with the number of stations depending on the size of the country. Workers at these stations are dispatched to recover pathogens from old Soviet research laboratories around the republics, package them safely and ship them to the central reference laboratories.
At the central reference facilities, human and veterinary pathogen samples taken from laboratories around the country are consolidated and cataloged, with information on the pathogens sent to an electronic database in the United States. These laboratories have state-of-the-art security and all workers undergo thorough background checks to protect against security breaches. Each state has at least one of these, Levac said.
This "top-to-bottom" cooperation creates a comprehensive statewide disease surveillance program, Levac said.