Battle against the new infectious disease lab heightens as state demands new environmental review.
Adrianne Appel
The future of Boston University’s infectious disease lab now under construction in the South End grew murkier yesterday when a federal judge said at a hearing that she may decide to halt the project’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, effectively stopping construction.
The hearing was the result of a lawsuit filed in May against NIH by the Conservation Law Foundation, a New England environmental advocacy group, on behalf of South End residents. They claim that BU’s federal environmental impact assessment for the facility was inadequate and that NIH should not have approved it.
The group has asked the court to order NIH to stop funding the laboratory immediately and to order BU to submit a new environmental application for approval.
The lab is currently scheduled to be completed in 2008, with $128 million in funding from NIH. The facility would include a biosafety level (BSL) 4 laboratory, which would deal with dangerous pathogens. The lawsuit claims that the environmental review did not adequately consider alternate sites for the lab, should have included more information about worst-case scenarios if a pathogen escapes the laboratory, and didn’t sufficiently outline measures for mitigating risks.
It also argues that by situating the lab in a low-income, racially mixed neighborhood, NIH did not adequately consider the federal standard for environmental justice.
The federal judge’s consideration comes on the heels of a state court’s recent decision that the state environmental application BU submitted was also inadequate. The Massachusetts environmental affairs secretary, Robert Golledge, announced early yesterday that BU must resubmit its application with more information.
In a packed federal courtroom yesterday, Judge Patti Saris expressed similar concern that the federal application did not include enough information, particularly about the pathogens to be studied other than anthrax and the routes of disease transmission. It was reasonable for the public to want this information, she said.
“Why shouldn’t you have discussed this in the environmental impact statement?” she asked those representing BU and NIH.
Anton Giedt, an assistant U.S. attorney representing NIH in court, said the risk to the community was low.
“The community is more at risk for tuberculosis than anything that would happen at this lab,” Giedt said.
Judge Saris spoke openly about the difficulty of choosing among the options before her: letting funding continue, halting the funding within a few weeks, or stopping the funding for only the BSL 4 portion of the facility.
If construction stopped for the three months that BU would need to prepare a new environmental application and if it received approval, it would cause a one-year delay in the construction schedule, said John Stevens, a lawyer representing BU.
He added that if the judge decides to stop the project’s funding, BU would consider appealing.
It may be several weeks before the judge reaches a decision. At points during the hearing, she said she needed to learn more about the science involved in the project.