A US government safety assessment supporting the location of an infectious-disease lab in Boston was ?not sound and credible?, says a report issued last week by the US National Research Council.

Construction of the $178-million Boston University National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory is due to finish in 2008, but one state and one federal lawsuit are challenging its opening. The facility will house research on deadly pathogens such as the Ebola and monkeypox viruses.

The report's criticisms are aimed at a document, released by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in July, that evaluated the facility's potential threat to its neighbours. It finds that the worst-case scenarios proposed by the NIH, including an Ebola outbreak caused by an infected lab worker, were not relevant to assessing the true risk. Pathogens with more potential to spread, such as influenza, should have been chosen, the report says. It adds that the NIH assessment suffers from shoddy risk analysis and modelling. The NIH says it will consider the report.