Livestock in the heart of US cattle country will be put at risk if foot-and-mouth disease escapes from the proposed National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. Credit: INGA SPENCE/Alamy

For Katharine Bossart, a trip to the lab can involve a 22-hour flight. Bossart, a microbiologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, works on treatments and vaccines for the Nipah and Hendra viruses, which are deadly to both horses and humans. Her research requires the highest level of biological security containment — BSL-4 — but no BSL-4 labs in the United States can accommodate horses, so she collaborates with researchers in Australia.

“If we want to protect large animals from these infections, then we have to test vaccines in them,” says Bossart.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has broken ground for a facility that would have allowed researchers such as Bossart to work closer to home. The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas, is designed to provide BSL-4 containment for large-animal studies and replace the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, the federal government’s 58-year-old BSL-3 installation off Long Island in New York. But the NBAF’s future has been thrown into question, with no new money allocated for it in the president’s proposed 2013 federal budget and reviewers considering fears about whether it could keep pathogens safely contained in the middle of prime US cattle country.

Last week, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) convened a closed meeting to review a revised risk assessment from the DHS, which it received on 10 February but has not yet made public. Congress ordered the report last year, after the NAS harshly criticized a 2010 assessment, citing factors such as the absence of back-up high-efficiency particulate filters in the building plans; flawed estimates of how quickly an outbreak could be detected and stopped; and poor consideration of the facility’s proximity to metropolitan areas and livestock. Beef producers have been particularly alarmed that the 2010 assessment put the cumulative risk of foot-and-mouth disease escaping from the NBAF over the facility’s projected 50-year lifespan at 70% (see ‘Fear factor’). The virus that causes the disease spreads quickly and would have a devastating effect on the US cattle industry if it escaped. US research with live foot-and-mouth virus is currently restricted to Plum Island.

Both the latest assessment and the review of it by the NAS, expected by June, are required by Congress before the US$50 million designated for the NBAF in the 2012 federal budget can be spent.

The 2013 budget not only commits no further funds to the NBAF, but also creates a new hurdle, requiring the NAS to examine whether current disease threats justify the facility, which could cost up to $1 billion to build.

“We understood going into this that issues would arise,” says Ron Trewyn, vice-president for research at Kansas State University (KSU) in Manhattan, which in 2009 helped the state to win its bid to host the NBAF. “Budget is a big deal these days, but given the importance of the NBAF to national security and to protecting our agricultural economy, we are confident that these issues will be worked through and it will move forward.”

Kansas has committed $105 million in bonds to support the facility, which is touted as an economic boon for the state. The site is adjacent to the KSU Biosecurity Research Institute, a BSL-3 facility that studies animal and plant pathogens. The university is now considering whether to send graduate students to Plum Island to build expertise. “We are working with Homeland Security and the US Department of Agriculture on Plum Island to develop the workforce that will ultimately work at the NBAF,” says Stephen Higgs, director of the Biosecurity Research Institute.

But critics of the facility welcomed the decision by President Barack Obama’s administration not to request further funding for it. “We are optimistic,” says Tom Manney, a retired KSU biophysicist who helps to lead a group called No NBAF in Kansas. The group says that a facility that works on highly infectious animal diseases does not belong “in the centre of the food-animal health corridor”.

Opponents voiced their concerns about the project at an NAS public meeting in Manhattan in January. “It is easy for those promoting the facility to argue for the Kansas site because their livelihoods are not at stake,” wrote cattle rancher Paul Irvine in a submitted statement.

What happens next will depend, in part, on the NAS’s judgement of the facility’s risks and benefits. The DHS says that the NBAF is needed to develop countermeasures against bioterrorism — a threat that resonates less now than it did immediately after the anthrax attacks on the United States in 2001. But the department also cites three threats that receive far less public attention. One is the growing likelihood of foreign animal diseases entering the United States as a result of international animal movement from commerce and smuggling. A second is the risk of animal-borne diseases spreading to humans as population growth and dispersal puts people into greater contact with wild animals. The third is the potential for global warming to expand the range of insect-borne diseases.

“Not having a facility like this is almost negligent,” says Higgs. “We have the capabilities to build a facility that will better prepare us in the event of some pathogen coming in. The NBAF will be the shining star in these types of labs.”

Soren Alexandersen, director of a BSL-4 facility in Winnipeg, Canada, that can accommodate small numbers of livestock, says that the challenges of running such labs can be met with technical measures. He adds that although many of the diseases studied in Winnipeg, including the Nipah Virus, are not currently found in North America, preparedness matters. “We have the methods and the facility in place so that we can start working,” he says.

Bossart agrees. “You can’t just flip a switch and make these facilities function,” she says. “If you don’t have these unique capabilities, you are not going to be able to respond if an outbreak occurs.”