Replies

That's just great. Get on Hwy. 45 in Galveston and head north 100 miles and there I am. I think some buildings changed owners after the Ike hurricane flood, I remember reading or seeing something about that, and would bet that's when that lab was started and I could be totally wrong about that.

Anyway, I didn't know there was such a lab there. A hurricane coming into Galveston could tear the building to pieces and a number of those buildings were flooded due to Ike. I think that's a poor place to have deadly diseases.

That’s just great. Get on Hwy. 45 in Galveston and head north 100 miles and there I am.”

There are just a whole lot of us stuck in the 100 miles between this lab and you. UTMB was closed for quite a while and they were pretty successful at remaining out of the press limelight after Ike. Nurse I know who worked there pre-Ike said we would be amazed at what all was not found after Ike hit.

Don’t know if you remember the flood of 2001 in the Med Center when we had something like 40 inches of rain with Allison. All kinds of stuff was in the basement of the medical buildings and ended up floating all through the sewer and bayou system.

Never thought of that...I guess a hurricane could blow those deadly cooties all the way up into Oklahoma.

I worked at UTMB for several years before retiring. The National Lab was built there specifically for the purpose of housing deadly viruses for research. It is built to withstand a Cat 5 Hurricane and was probably the only building on campus to suffer little or no damage from Hurricane Ike.

The lab is there because of politics and location. The fact that Galveston is a barrier island allows for easy cut-off from the mainland in the event of the release of a deadly biological agent. All that needs to be done is stop the ferries running to Bolivar, close I-45 at the causeway bridge and and the train tracks, and to the west, close San Luis Pass. The only other way off the island is to swim the Gulf. Anybody on the island at the time of such a release will be quarantined until the risk is cleared.

They did have problems with lab security when I was there. I worked in an area where my team and I would need to go into the lab on a regular basis. They also have a large foreign student population which is worrisome. The folks who work on campus found out about this about the same time as the general public did. The folks running the National Lab of course knew because of the inspection.

The stories they are putting out there are ridiculous. Galveston is a port city. If they have Venezuelan ships in in port, they most likely will have Venezuelan rats. Also, what mechanism keeps other rats exposed to the virus from being infected? How can they be sure? The plague was thought at one time to be confined to rats and not transmittable to other species. This whole thing has cover-up written all over it, especially the story that the vial could have stuck to someone's glove and been accidentally disposed of. There will be more coming out of this.