City tells BU to bolster safety of its medical labs

In a scathing report examining the exposure of three Boston University researchers to tularemia last year, Boston public health authorities yesterday called on BU to strengthen internal oversight of safety in medical school laboratories.

The study by the Boston Public Health Commission is sharply critical of safety lapses in the lab where the scientists contracted potentially lethal tularemia while developing a vaccine against the bacterial disease, commonly known as rabbit fever.

While the report details previously disclosed failures by researchers to follow safety precautions, it also criticized the university for failing to embrace procedures that would have swiftly detected the cluster of illnesses among scientists. The first two researchers fell ill in May, but it wasn't until after a third became seriously sick in September that senior scientists began to suspect that the illnesses might be linked to the tularemia research.

Top representatives of the Public Health Commission sketched out their findings last night for Boston city councilors, who were meeting to collect testimony about BU's ability to operate a proposed lab where researchers could study the deadliest known pathogens, including ebola, plague, and anthrax.

Several councilors -- including Maura Hennigan, who is running for mayor against incumbent Thomas M. Menino, an ardent champion of the planned lab -- posed this question: If BU could not safely operate a lower-security facility, how can it be trusted to run a high security lab that would handle lethal agents?

The hearing by the City Council was also prompted by concerns over sanctions imposed by water regulators against BU for improper discharges of silver and mercury into sewer systems. The metallic residue came, in some cases, from X-rays, and authorities from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority said other hospitals and labs were guilty of similar breaches.

That was of little comfort to Councilor Chuck Turner, an opponent of BU's plans for the high-security facility, known as a Biosafety Level 4 lab.

''What's going to happen when they're dealing with substances that are much, much, much more dangerous than silver and mercury?" Turner asked.

The public health authorities said the Level 4 lab would be built and operated with such stringent safeguards that accidents would be highly improbable. Still, when councilors pressed Dr. Anita Barry, the city's director of communicable disease control, about whether she could guarantee that there would never be mistakes in research labs, she responded: ''I would never say there will never be human error."

Barry authored the report on the tularemia exposures at BU. In it, she concluded that scientists working with the tularemia bacteria repeatedly failed to follow safety procedures, working with the material in the open when they should have been using enclosed research cabinets.

The scientists, all of whom recovered, believed they were working with an innocuous form of the germ, genetically engineered for research purposes. But the harmless strain had somehow become contaminated with a highly lethal form of tularemia.

Barry's report also faults the university, declaring that BU failed to have adequate systems in place to detect clusters of illness among researchers and that the committee charged with assuring safety in biological research lacked sufficient power.

''Clearly, enough wasn't done," Barry said in an interview. ''There certainly was room at BU for there to be monitoring so that any risk of illness would be minimized."

Barry's boss -- John M. Auerbach, executive director of the Public Health Commission -- pledged to city councilors that his agency would toughen its oversight of labs at BU and other research facilities in the city.

In a statement released last night, university administrators promised to abide by the findings of the city investigators.

''Boston University Medical Center wholeheartedly endorses the recommendations of the Boston Public Health Commission that resulted from its investigation," the statement said.

''Many of the commission's recommendations are changes that we have already made or are in the process of implementing. These recommendations will enhance the safety of laboratory workers in Boston."

Globe correspondent Madison Park contributed to this report. Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.