Montana community soon will be home to a biodefense lab
HAMILTON, Mont. -- Montana's Bitterroot Valley has long offered a respite from the modern world, an area of small-town values with a thriving log cabin business and rivers beloved by fishermen.
The bucolic setting between two mountain ranges in western Montana will soon host one of the nation's few biowarfare defense labs, a controversial $66.5 million building where scientists will research dangerous pathogens in an effort to stem deadly attacks.
''It's an unfortunate mission, but unfortunately it's a necessity, especially after 9/11," said Joe Petrusaitis, the mayor of this city of about 4,400 residents. ''The community mostly supported it, but we did have detractors."
Scientists came to the Bitterroot Valley early in the 20th century to study the outbreak of an often fatal disease that was named Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
In 1928, some residents sued to prevent the building of what became Rocky Mountain Laboratories. To calm fears, the lab agreed to build a long-since demolished and never-used moat around its buildings to keep disease-carrying ticks in check.
In later years, it worked on numerous infectious diseases, including Lyme disease and prion diseases, a type of disease that includes mad cow disease. It is now part of the network of US infectious disease labs with 250 workers.
With white-coated scientists behind closed doors, the Rocky Mountain Lab created a mysterious aura, perhaps heightened by a suspicion of government strong in much of the West.
''Until around 2000, the lab did not do as good a job at promoting its research program as it does now," said Marshall Bloom, who became lab director in 2002. ''In the local community, there was a lot of concern."
That concern intensified with the announcement of biodefense plans that would involve staff wearing space-age contamination suits in airtight labs. The new facility should be ready next year, with biodefense work scheduled for 2007.
''It is a logical extension of what had gone on here virtually 100 years," Bloom said.
The United States unilaterally renounced biological weapons in 1969, a commitment fixed by treaty in 1972.
The Clinton administration boosted germ warfare defenses in the late 1990s. Since 2001, Washington has spent billions on fighting germs such as anthrax and plague, and has announced plans to add to the nation's four existing Biosafety Level 4 biodefense facilities. In Boston, plans for a high-security lab at Boston University Medical Center have met similar opposition.
The Rocky Mountain Labs would become the only such facility in the West, an expansion that prompted a lawsuit seeking to block its construction.
''Folks were concerned about the lab being some sort of target of bioterrorism," said Alexandra Gorman, science director at Women's Voices for the Earth. ''People were concerned about agents of bioterrorism that they were working on in the lab getting out into the community."
Mary Wulff of the Coalition for a Safe Lab said the lab once failed to account for a bag of radioactive waste and had dumped chemicals into a nearby landfill in the 1980s. ''The BL-4 [Biosafety Level 4] building boom was a knee-jerk reaction by our government after 9/11," she said.
Bloom declined to say whether he thought Washington was overreacting to bioterrorism, but said anthrax and viruses that occur in nature should be studied.
''If you look at the list of all the causes of emerging and re-emerging disease . . . the intentional introduction of infectious disease is pretty low down on the list," he said.
Some specialists also caution that biodefense is similar to banned offensive bioweapons research. ''We have to understand what the virus's tricks are . . . to treat or defend against it," Bloom said.
