Danger Is Their Business

High-security equipment includes hoods with an inward flow of air to keep viruses from escaping. (USDA Photo, 1971)

AT PLUM ISLAND, they make an art of isolation.

For the sake of biological safety, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Plum Island Animal Disease Center sits on a small island located almost two miles offshore, across the choppy waters of Plum Gut from the tip of Long Island's North Fork.

There, day in and day out, the staff works on the inner intricacies of three animal viruses -- foot and mouth disease, African swine fever and vesicular stomatitis. All three represent threats to America's livestock industry, so they must be rigidly isolated during research.

Plum Island comes by its isolation naturally. The scrub-covered, 643-acre island is one among several chunks of land left behind by retreating glacial ice. Plum Island was also once known as Ft. Terry, in honor of Army Maj. Gen. Alfred N. Terry. It is 136 miles from New York City, 13 miles from New London, Conn., and two miles from Orient Point.

According to old records, on a remote part of the island there's an old tombstone that marks the remains of Thomas Gardiner -- 1724 to 1786 -- the son of John Gardiner of Narragansett and thought to be one of the very early settlers of Plum Island.

The island began to be acquired by the government in 1826, when the precursor of the Coast Guard was deeded several acres on Plum Island's southwestern tip, site of the present-day lighthouse. It overlooks an approach to New York from the Atlantic Ocean. In 1897 the government acquired another 150 acres to set up defense facilities.

The entire island became government property in 1901, when the War Department bought the rest of Plum Island and began to construct coastal defenses. During World War II, defensive structures were greatly augmented. After the war, however, much of the island was abandoned, and Army facilities were declared surplus.

In 1948, after foot and mouth disease was eliminated from the United States, Congress ordered construction of an animal disease research laboratory in an isolated place. One reason Plum Island was chosen, historians have said, is that the winds around it generally blow toward the ocean, so if any microbes escape, they are unlikely to reach land.

The laboratory opened its doors in 1954, and research began.

Documents suggest that some of the early animal disease research was done with biological warfare in mind. The "intended" targets of the bioweapons being studied were the livestock on which the former Soviet Union was very dependent, the Army wrote in 1951.

All offensive biowarfare research in the United States was halted in 1969 by President Richard Nixon, however. The major center for America's biowarfare research was at Ft. Detrick, Md.

At present, the Plum Island laboratory is internationally known for its highly secure research on animal diseases. So much effort goes into biological security, in fact, said former staff member Tilahun Yilma, that Plum Island has "the cleanest federal employees you can find on Earth." Yilma now does research at the University of California, Davis.

He said cleanliness and security are so strongly enforced at Plum Island that workers must strip naked, and then don clean "government clothes" on their way into the laboratory every morning. And on their way out, he said, employees are scrubbed clean, right down to their fingernails, before they get their own clothes back. (The three animal diseases under study now rarely affect humans.)

Also, Yilma said, everything that isn't human gets sterilized thoroughly, twice in an autoclave, before leaving the facility.

The laboratories are designed so they have "negative pressure," meaning that if there is an air leak, the air flows into the laboratory rather than out. That precaution, meant to keep dangerous microbes from getting out, is standard in highly secure laboratories.

"The center of the laboratory is used for housing the animals" that are used in virus studies, Yilma said, and that area "is under the most negative pressure. As you go toward the periphery, it becomes less and less" depressurized.

Inside the laboratories is standard high-security equipment, such as fume hoods and "special hoods where you work with viruses." And two kinds of decontaminants are used to clean equipment. "There are acids for agents such as foot and mouth disease, and others like lye for severely acid-resistant agents like swine vesicular disease."

Decontamination with the acids involves the use of glove boxes made for working directly with virus samples.

While he was at Plum Island, Yilma was working on a genetically engineered virus -- vaccinia -- that has since been developed into a potent vaccine against a major cattle disease, rinderpest. Yilma said he hopes the vaccine will begin to be used on a wide basis in eastern Africa.

Alfonso Torres, the laboratory's director, said 167 people run the Plum Island Animal Diseases Center. In addition to research on the three animal viruses, the laboratory tests the blood of animals in quarantine. The tests are meant to detect about 30 diseases known to exist abroad.

"When animals are being imported," Torres explained, "they are first quarantined abroad, and blood samples are collected and sent to Plum Island for testing." If they seem disease-free, the animals are then sent to a quarantine facility at Key West, Fla.

"They stay there for about 90 days -- mixed in with `sentinel animals' born in the United States -- and then additional blood samples are tested here" at Plum Island, Torres said. Only if they are shown to be disease-free are the foreign farm animals allowed to enter the United States.

Animal physiologist George Seidel, at Colorado State University, said having an animal disease research center such as Plum Island "is obviously a very important thing. They concentrate on exotic diseases not normally found in this country. The diseases aren't here, but if they should get in, we'll have a backlog of research and expertise to deal with them."

So in a sense, Seidel said, Plum Island "is best thought of as a superimportant insurance policy for the livestock industry."

Torres said the laboratory also trains veterinarians and other animal health specialists, develops novel vaccines and identifies improved testing methods. The laboratory also maintains the North American foot and mouth disease vaccine bank.

The laboratory's support facilities onshore are next to the ferry landing at Orient Point. They serve two USDA branches, the Agriculture Research Service and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

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