A Biosafety level is the level of the Biocontainment precautions required to isolate dangerous biological agents in an enclosed facility. The levels of containment range from the lowest Biosafety level 1 to the highest at level 4. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have specified these levels.[1] In the European Union, the same Biosafety levels are defined in a directive.

History:

The first prototype Class III cabinet was fashioned in 1943 by Hubert Kaempf, then a U.S. Army soldier, under the direction of Dr. Arnold G. Wedum, Director (1944-69) of Industrial Health and Safety at the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, Fort Detrick, Maryland. Kaempf had tired of his MP duties at Detrick and was able to transfer to the sheet metal department working with the contractor, the H.K. Ferguson Co.

*Samples of this Influenza missing from Fort Detrick*

Biosafety level 4

This level is required for work with dangerous and exotic agents that pose a high individual risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections, agents which cause severe to fatal disease in humans for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, Mar burg virus, Ebola virus, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other various hemorrhagic diseases.

Study uncovers a lethal secret of 1918 influenza virus

MADISON -- In a study of non-human primates infected with the influenza virus that killed 50 million people in 1918, an international team of scientists has found a critical clue to how the virus killed so quickly and efficiently.

Writing this week (Jan. 18, 2007) in the journal Nature, a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka reveals how the 1918 virus - modern history's most savage influenza strain - unleashes an immune response that destroys the lungs in a matter of days, leading to death.

The finding is important because it provides insight into how the virus that swept the world in the closing days of World War I was so efficiently deadly, claiming many of its victims people in the prime of life. The work suggests that it may be possible in future outbreaks of highly pathogenic flu to stem the tide of death through early intervention.

The study "proves the 1918 virus was indeed different from all of the other flu viruses we know of," says Kawaoka, a professor in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and at the University of Tokyo.

The new study, conducted at the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, utilized the 1918 flu virus, which has been reconstructed by researchers using genes obtained from the tissues of victims of the great pandemic in a reverse genetics process that enables scientists to make fully functioning viruses.

By infecting monkeys with the virus, the team was able to show that the 1918 virus prompted a deadly respiratory infection that echoed historical accounts of how the disease claimed its victims.

Importantly, the new work shows that infection with the virus prompted an immune response that seems to derail the body's typical reaction to viral infection and instead unleashes an attack by the immune system on the lungs. As immune cells attack the respiratory system, the lungs fill with fluid and victims, in essence, drown. The mechanisms that contribute to the lethality of the virus were uncovered by University of Washington researchers using functional genomics, a technique in which researchers analyze the gene functions and interactions.


The same excessive immune reaction is characteristic of the deadly complications of H5N1 avian influenza, the strain of bird flu present in Asia and which has claimed nearly 150 human lives but has not yet shown a capacity to spread easily among people.

"What we see with the 1918 virus in infected monkeys is also what we see with H5N1 viruses," Kawaoka says, suggesting that the ability to modulate immune response may be a shared feature of the most virulent influenza viruses.
In the new study, conducted in a high-level biosafety laboratory (BSL 4) at the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory, seven primates were infected with the reconstructed 1918 virus. Clinical signs of disease were apparent within 24 hours of infection and within eight days euthanasia was necessary. The rapid course of the disease mirrors how quickly the disease ran its course in its human victims in 1918.

Upon infection, the virus grew rapidly in the infected animals, suggesting the agent somehow sets the stage for virulent infection: "Somehow, early in infection, this virus does something to the host that allows it to grow really well," says Kawaoka. "But we don't know what that is."

"The bard of biological weapons captures the drama of the front lines."
–Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navy

The first major bioterror event in the United States — the anthrax attacks in October 2001--was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a #1 New York Times bestseller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense.

Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at USAMRIID, a wry virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world's most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top-secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will take on smallpox – and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two high-security freezers—one at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea. "The bard of biological weapons captures the drama of the front lines."
–Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navy

The first major bioterror event in the United States — the anthrax attacks in October 2001--was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a #1 New York Times bestseller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense.

Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at USAMRIID, a wry virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world's most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top-secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will take on smallpox – and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two high-security freezers—one at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by the thought that biologists in secret labs are using the techniques of genetic engineering to create a new superpox virus – a smallpox that is resistant to all vaccines.

Jahrling is haunted by the thought that biologists in secret labs are using the techniques of genetic engineering to create a new superpox virus – a smallpox that is resistant to all vaccines.

Originally posted by Cyberbian
What the article dosen't say is that they did something to that virus to make it more deadly than in 1918.

In 1918 only 1 in 3 people were infected, and 3 of 100 infected died.

The article suggests a 100% severe infection rate leading to death in a test group of only 7 monkeys. With seven monkeys, you would not expect any to become severely ill.

If that engineered virus were loose there would very few humans left on this planet.



[edit on 4-5-2009 by Cyberbian]

The 1918 flu pandemic, commonly referred to as the Spanish flu, was a category 5 influenza pandemic caused by an unusually severe and deadly Influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1. Many of its victims were healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affect juvenile, elderly, or otherwise weakened patients.
The difference between the influenza mortality age-distributions of the 1918 epidemic and normal epidemics. Deaths per 100,000 persons in each age group, United States, for the inter pandemic years 1911–1917 (dashed line) and the pandemic year 1918 (solid line).[28]

The Spanish flu pandemic lasted from 1918 to 1919, although Price-Smith's data suggest it may have begun in Austria in the Spring of 1917.[29] Older estimates say it killed 40–50 million people[30] while current estimates say 50 million to 100 million people worldwide were killed.[31] This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed as many people as the Black Death [32], although the Black Death is estimated to have killed over a fifth of the world's population at the time [33], a significantly higher proportion. This huge death toll was caused by an extremely high infection rate of up to 50% and the extreme severity of the symptoms, suspected to be caused by cytokine storms.[30] Indeed, symptoms in 1918 were so unusual that initially influenza was misdiagnosed as dengue, cholera, or typhoid. One observer wrote, "One of the most striking of the complications was hemorrhage from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach, and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and petechial l hemorrhages in the skin also occurred."[31] The majority of deaths were from bacterial pneumonia, a secondary infection caused by influenza, but the virus also killed people directly, causing massive hemorrhages and edema in the lung.[28]

The Spanish flu pandemic was truly global, spreading even to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. The unusually severe disease killed between 2 and 20% of those infected, as opposed to the more usual flu epidemic mortality rate of 0.1%.[31][28] Another unusual feature of this pandemic was that it mostly killed young adults, with 99% of pandemic influenza deaths occurring in people under 65, and more than half in young adults 20 to 40 years old.[34] This is unusual since influenza is normally most deadly to the very young (under age 2) and the very old (over age 70). The total mortality of the 1918–1919 pandemic is not known, but it is estimated that up to 1% of the world's population was killed. As many as 25 million may have been killed in the first 25 weeks; in contrast, HIV/AIDS has killed 25 million in its first 25 years.[31]