The curious case of tuberculosis (and more)

If you have confidence in incident reports filed with NIH, then you probably think that the vast majority of BSL-3 lab accidents are caused by tuberculosis researchers like this one. I have rather many doubts about that.

[Today includes discussion of a sewage spill at USDA’s Ames, Iowa lab, and an interesting incident of the biosafety staff at a major northeastern institution rebelling against an IBC reluctant to report problems.]

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this post is about a tuberculosis lab accident. It’s not. At least not exactly. It’s about many of them, and what they mean, and don’t mean, as best as I can determine at this point in time.

For the past several months I’ve had FOIA pending with NIH for reports of lab accidents. In some cases, I am also requesting such reports directly from the institutions themselves. At this point, neither process is complete, so my observations are based on incomplete data.

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The intersection of the NIH Guidelines, FOIA, and state open records

“Thank you letting us turn your request under the Guidelines into one under our state law. You are now number 8,211 in line. You will receive blacked out documents in about the year 2028. Have a nice day, Sincerely, The Marketing Dept and General Counsel’s Office. Go State! Winning!”

One of the purposes of this website is to document a few things I’ve learned from years of tracking Institutional Biosafety Committees using the Public Access Provisions of the NIH Guidelines. The aim is to be useful to others who will file future requests. In addition to talking about the intersection of the Guidelines and laws, this post is a bit of a walk through of an NIH Guidelines request that may help you not fall into traps that I learned about the hard way.

(Today’s victim: The USDA National Wildlife Research Center, read on!)

A few days ago, the question of how the Guidelines relate to state open records laws first came up in reference to the dysfunctional situation at the University of Tennessee. This post goes further into the Guidelines’ status vis-à-vis FOIA and state records laws, because it is a really quite an important issue. If you don’t know how these different obligations relate to one another, and don’t relate to one another, the sociopathic but clever lawyers at universities and other labs will use your ignorance to screw you left, right, and center.

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