Recordpub.com - Biosafety facility unveiled at KSU: Program trains how to handle bioterror

By Dave O’Brien

Record-Courier staff writer

Most Americans who are old enough remember where they were Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the United States, killing more than 3,000 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Western Pennsylvania.

But as Kent State University professor Christopher Woolverton pointed out Friday at the unveiling of KSU’s new National Biosafety and Biocontainment Training Program, few probably remember where they were Oct. 11, 2001. That’s the day Americans learned of a series of anthrax-by-mail attacks that eventually killed five people and sickened 17 others.

Such events are the reason KSU and the National Institutes of Health have partnered to create the biodefense training lab in KSU’s Cunningham Hall, Woolverton said. It is only the second of its kind in the U.S., university officials said.

The NBBTP, as it is known, trains public health professionals, employees of private industry and government officials on how to react to potential bioterrorism or pandemic diseases such as H1N1.

“It is sometimes said that we need to buy a vowel,” joked Murray Cohen, president and chairman of Frontline Healthcare Workers Safety Foundation Inc., with regard to the use of so many acronyms. His agency administers the NBBTP for the U.S. government.

KSU’s lab does not contain any harmful or fatal microorganisms or agents. Instead, it uses “surrogate materials” that pose no risk to workers or the public while allowing trainees to test, plan and train for a pandemic disease or terror attack.

KSU officials credited former U.S. Rep. Ralph Regula, who attended Friday’s event, with securing federal funding for the initiative.

“I always had one mission in Congress, and that was to make Ohio No. 1,” Regula said.

Deborah Wilson, director of the Division of Occupational Health and Safety at the National Institutes of Health, said the program will let public health professionals mentor to students as they were once mentored.

Wilson and Cohen both said public health will create a large market for jobs in Ohio and across the nation.

“It’s ‘Field of Dreams’ kind of stuff,” Cohen said. “‘If you build it, they will come.’”

“We want the brightest and the best, and I’m sure a majority of them will come from Kent State,” Wilson said.

The new designation, unveiled as the new College of Public Health takes shape on the Kent campus, is only the second such program in the nation. The first opened in May 2008 at Kansas State University’s Biosecurity Research Institute.

“We all wish there were no need for such a facility against emerging disease and bioterrorism,” said KSU President Lester Lefton. “This is going to have a wide-reaching effect on not just Ohioans but our entire nation.”