Community groups protesting the proliferation of biodefense 'hot labs' conjure up scenarios of lax security, accidental infections and dangerous microbes escaping into the neighborhood to bolster their case. A previously unreleased report on inspections of existing labs suggests that only luck has kept those scenarios from becoming reality.

In April, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the US Department of Health and Human Services reported problems with security, database access and record keeping at 11 unnamed university labs. The inspections were carried out in 2002 but the report, completed in 2003, was not made public.

In response to numerous requests, particularly from the academic community, however, the agency released a summary, citing “serious weaknesses that compromised the security of select agents at all of the universities reviewed.”

The labs handle 39 'select agents'—toxins, viruses and other potential bioweapons such as anthrax. The inspectors found unlocked security doors, easy access to lab keys and scant attention to security badges, leaving labs vulnerable to intruders. The report also cited problems with sensitive data. In one case, a worker circulated an email with the lab's select agent registry to people outside the university. Researchers were also not required to maintain select agent inventories. In some cases, they did not document to whom they shipped those agents.

Under the US PATRIOT Act, institutions handling select agents were required to register with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and meet strict safety standards by March 2003. But at the time of the inspections, many labs had just begun implementing the measures, says Ted Jones, acting director of the CDC's select agent program. Jones says new inspections would find a very different system. “I would describe it as a sea change,” he says.

Jonathan King, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he draws little comfort from the PATRIOT Act provisions. Secrecy provisions in the act will only make it more difficult for communities to assess risks from the agents at the labs, says King, who is one of more than 150 academics in the Boston area opposing a plan to build a national bio-containment lab in the city. The US National Institutes of Health's budget calls for 11 such labs at some of the country's premier research institutions (Nat. Med. 9, 805; 2003).