Boston University's plan to build a bio-weapons lab funded by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has run into stiff resistance from the Roxbury community. The $127 million dollar project will be a facility for Bio-safety Level 4 agents, the most severe classification for biotoxins, that could include anthrax, Ebola, and small pox. Despite the risks to the surrounding community there will be no oversight or input at either the local or state level and any national oversight can be classified. The other three Level 4 facilities in the nation are in much less densely populated areas. In Roxbury however, the population is largely black or Latino and in an economic stranglehold much like parts of the South and West sides of Chicago.

Today a few hundred people braved streets filled with Democratic Party delegates and the Boston Police to rally and march against the proposed bioweapons facility. Safety Net/Ace organizer Dolly Battle had a terse response when questioned about the potential problems of the lab, "Everybody could die." Even in a less-than-total annihilation of the locals, Dolly raises the points that, "There are no known cures for level-4 bioweapons and the neighborhood is a sitting duck. The only thing to do is to fight it."

The planning for the bioweapons lab and the bidding and approval process were long in the works before any public notice was given. Even after the contract was awarded it was another six months before the first public hearing on it. The first meeting was in February and was advertised in two public libraries, neither one in Roxbury. The Roxbury community organization Safety Net received a call recommending that they attend the meeting. The citizens attending the meeting were told by BU's Mark Klempner that, "There is nothing to worry about," and, "We do this kind of stuff all the time." The dearth of Level 4 facilities nationwide (three) suggests otherwise. The event MC, Klare Allen of Safety Net, reports that about 85 professor/academic types were at the second meeting and most of them spoke in technical language that folks lacking a PhD would have some difficulty following. The hesitation in answering the residents' questions clearly raised suspicions and the passing mention of Hantavirus, plague and other lethal agents raised hell. Klare recalls the reaction, “We gonna tell everyone and their mama.”

Dotting the stage today were community members and activists who picked apart, piece by piece, the claims made by BU and government officials. Abigail Austrie points out that threats to the community are effectively muted by the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 (sometimes called the Preparedness Act) that requires several levels of approval before community notification is given in the event of contamination. Additionally, Boston University will “not be liable for anything.” Another claim that the facility will provide jobs for the community is as transparent as compassionate conservatism. The level of education necessary to perform essentially every task puts the jobs out of reach for most residents of Roxbury. Nor will the facility, even if running flawlessly, make Boston a safer city to live in. According to the NIAID Request for Proposals and Applications (RFPA) the building will “not include clinical space that would be used only in the event of a bioterrorism emergency,” much less when there is no threat. That the lab is no cause for concern seems to be odd coming from NIAID given that in a December, 2000, it wrote in a memo that a reason to build a Level 4 lab in rural Montana, “well removed from major population centers” is that “the location of the laboratory reduces the possibility that an accidental release of a biosafety level-4 organism would lead to a major public health disaster.”

The residual effects of the Bhopal disaster almost 20 years ago still haunt the residents. There however, there was no threat of contamination to people not in the area directly affected. Dolly is concerned that an accident in Roxbury might not only not being a limited contamination with even a single contagious agent. “Imagine an accident with more than one disease!” With 50,000 people living within a one mile radius and more than one million living within ten miles, the potential results of an accident are overwhelming given the infection and mortality rates for diseases such as Ebola and Bubonic plague.

That the proposed facility is located in Roxbury is lost on exactly nobody. I asked a few different speakers at today's event about the chances of a similar facility being built in Brookline, a significantly wealthier area immediately next to most of Boston University's campus. They responded as follows:
“Oh hell no!” - Klare Allen
“Not gonna happen.” - 11th district candidate David Ebonyallen Berkley
“Never.” - Sara Barrientes, League of United Latin American Citizens

Environmental racism in Boston is nothing new. Dolly says, “We already have an unfair share of the City's trash facilities and diesel bus and truck depots. And we suffer from the highest rates of asthma in the state. Now this bioterror lab? No way!” The hard work of the community is starting to pay off. They have rallied the support of three out of thirteen city councilors (nine are needed to stop the plan). Longtime activists/scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn have jumped on board. The cause has grown to include more than the usual suspects though. Ambassador James Leonard, the head of the United States Delegation to the Biological Weapons Convention Negotiations in 1972, has come out on the side of the community and has Dr. Richard Spertzel, the senior biologist on the staff of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) from 1994-1998. Boston University is having trouble even getting its own staff on board. BU School of Public Health's Professor David Ozonoff says, “this facility, rather than protecting us from bioterrorism, has the real potential for making us less safe. We've already seen that the anthrax used in the post 9-11 mail attacks came from just such a US laboratory. More recently, an outbreak of SARS in China was caused by a lab worker who got infected and transmitted the disease to others.”

Folks interested in helping stop environmental racism in Roxbury can contact Penn Loh at (617)442-3343 or Tomas Aguilar at (617)442-3343. More information is available on the website www.ace-ej.org.

Information for this article was gathered from relevant websites, ACE materials and personal interviews. Photos courtesy of Rochester IMC.