The air-lock doors are blazed with the international symbol for biohazard, a red trefoil that reminds me of a flower. Military people consider this air lock a gray zone, a place where two worlds meet. Then you enter an antechamber, a kind of air lock. You pull the helmet down over your head and close the suit. You put on surgical scrubs and then a space suit. To go inside a Biosafety Level 4 hot suite that contains life, first you have to strip naked. It holds equally at USAMRIID and at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, which are the only two laboratories in the United States that can handle BL-4 viruses. If you want to shake hands with one of these viruses, you had better wear a space suit. The Army does not publish a list of the viruses it keeps in the hot suites at USAMRIID, but here is a list of BL-4 viruses: Junin. All the biocontainment laboratories at USAMRIID are kept under negative air pressure, so that if a leak develops air will flow into the hot rooms and out of the normal world, rather than the other way around. The hot agents live in the hot suites in blood serum and bits of meat, frozen at -70° Centigrade. It is in the nature of hot agents to travel through the air: they can become airborne. A BL-4 hot agent is a lethal virus for which, in most cases, there is no vaccine and no cure. The Biosafety Level 4 rooms contain BL-4 agents, also known as hot agents. The levels go from Biosafety Level 1, which is the lowest, up to Biosafety Level 4, the highest. The laboratory suites at USAMRIID are maintained at four levels of biological security. That is, the Institute knows methods for stopping a monster virus before it ignites an explosive chain of lethal transmission in the human race. It specializes in vaccines, drug therapy, and biocontainment. The Institute conducts research into ways to protect soldiers against biological weapons and natural infectious diseases. The mission of USAMRIID is medical defense. The Potomac bends through oak-blanketed mountains at Harpers Ferry and enters farmland, and eventually passes near Reston, Virginia, a town outside the Washington Beltway where farms give way to business parks, and where in the eighties office buildings accreted like crystals. Fort Detrick, the envelope of USAMRIID, sits in rolling country on the eastern slope of the Appalachian Mountains, in the drainage of the Potomac River. Vent stacks on its roof discharge filtered exhaust air from sealed biological laboratories inside the building. Or they call the place RIID, as in getting rid of something. Military people call the structure the Institute, or they call it by its acronym, USAMRIID, drawling it as You Sam Rid. The main building of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases is an essentially windowless concrete block that covers several acres at Fort Detrick, an Army base in Frederick, Maryland, fifteen miles east of Antietam.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |