Universities fear loss of funds, don't report problems, foes say Dallas Morning News, July 4, 2007 AUSTIN - Texas universities have sought and won hundreds of millions of dollars in federal biodefense research grants since the Sept. 11 attacks, building high-security labs to study infectious diseases that could be turned into deadly weapons.  But news last week that Texas A&M University had failed to report the exposure of four lab workers to infectious diseases - and the indefinite suspension Saturday of all the university's research on "select agents" - has prompted renewed safety concerns. Experts say the research is as safe as it can be. Lab workers at the 350 facilities nationwide authorized by the CDC to handle select agents - everything from the Ebola virus to smallpox - are highly trained, and their lab work is closely regulated by the agency at specific checkpoints. Federal officials say the research is all defensive: The country must protect itself from infectious agents that, if released here, could wipe out livestock, damage food and water supplies, or cause widespread illness and death. Opponents argue that labs are effectively creating deadly diseases in their effort to seek vaccines - and they say the research violates the spirit of a decades-old treaty banning the manufacture of biological weapons. In the midst of this debate is Texas, a national leader in biodefense research and a top recipient of federal funding. The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, a federally sanctioned "Regional Center of Excellence" for bioterrorism research, is home to one of the country's few bio-safety level 4 facilities. It has received about $350 million in federal grants since 2002 to construct labs and research the world's most dangerous biological agents. The campus is one of two in the U.S. chosen by federal authorities to house a new national biocontainment laboratory. Dr. Stanley Lemon, a UTMB professor of microbiology and immunology who directs the federally funded Galveston National Laboratory, said that over the last five years, his university has recorded 17 cases of potential exposure to infectious diseases, just a few of those from the biodefense department. None of them resulted in infections, he said, and only one - a potential exposure where a lab worker was pricked by a needle that had been used on a mouse being treated for anthrax poisoning - was serious enough that the lab reported it to CDC.