KU laboratory safety procedures explained

Bill Picking knows the painstakingly tight precautions placed on laboratories that deal with diseases such as the bubonic plague.

So when he heard Wednesday that 30 vials of plague were reported missing at Texas Tech University, he knew something had gone terribly wrong.

“I thought, ‘Oh my. Heads are going to roll,'” he said. “That’s not something you want to lose.”

The Texas Tech vials were later discovered to have been destroyed.

Kansas University doesn’t have samples of bubonic plague on its Lawrence or KU Medical Center campuses. Even if it did, Picking, an associate professor of molecular biosciences, and others at KU say strict safety regulations on bioscience labs make break-ins or other security breaches unlikely.

Bioscience labs are rated Biosafety Levels (BSL) 1 through 4, with BSL-4 labs requiring the strictest safety guidelines.

The highest-security labs at KU are two BSL-3 labs, the same level required for those that keep bubonic plague. There are only a handful of BSL-4 labs in the country, which are equipped to handle agents such as the viruses that cause smallpox and Ebola virus.

One KU lab, at the Higuchi Biosciences Center on West Campus, is for studying botulinum, the toxin that causes botulism and also is used for Botox, the cosmetic drug that fights wrinkles. The other, at the Med Center, is for studying HIV.

Another BSL-3 lab under construction in Haworth Hall will be used to study West Nile virus.

BSL-3 labs are required to be locked, with strict inventory standards, said Eric Jeppesen, lab safety specialist with the Office of Environmental Health and Safety.

“It’s very secure,” he said. “We try to get out to the labs on a regular basis to do formal and informal inspections and keep up on different activities. It’s all geared toward protecting public health and the health of the researchers that are trying to find a vaccine or new treatments.”

Ruth Schukman-Dakotas, director of the Safety Office at the Med Center, said she expected more BSL-3 labs to be designated with the construction of the new biosciences research building on the campus.

She said oversight of university laboratories had been much more strict since the anthrax scares in fall 2001.

“Before, universities didn’t have rigid assessment of our inventory,” she said. “That’s much heightened now. I think it’s warranted in this day and age.”

She said if vials of dangerous biological agents were missing from a KU laboratory, her office would contact police immediately so they could be part of the investigation.

Picking, who studies organisms related to plague that cause diarrhea, said the 30 vials of plague in Texas wouldn’t have affected a large number of people.

“It depends on what they were after,” he said. “You’d have a big panic, a few people sick and a lot of people scared. If five cases of bubonic plague showed up in Lawrence, that would certainly grab publicity. If you’re after headlines, it’s a big impact.”