A recent outbreak in southern England of foot-and-mouth disease, caused by a virus that quickly infects cattle, contains a reminder for San Diego County's biomedical researchers: Even the most highly trained scientists sometimes make mistakes.

The British government's initial investigation found a "strong probability" that the virus involved came from labs working on the disease near the farm where the outbreak was first detected. The August outbreak prompted a European ban on British beef that ended Thursday.

Several labs in San Diego County study bacteria or viruses that the federal government recommends handling under "biosafety level three" conditions, lingo that describes measures such as double doors and air filters that counter the threat of airborne transmission.

Air of mystery

These infectious agents range from tuberculosis and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to more exotic "select agents" such as anthrax. Federal regulations require researchers to have background checks before they can work with select agents.

Government agencies and research institutions are reluctant to pinpoint where select agents are being worked on, saying that animal rights activists elsewhere have used publicly available information to perform acts of sabotage.

"What worries me are the labs working on pandemic influenza," said Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, a biological and chemical weapons watchdog group in Austin, Texas. "One guy walks out with the wrong kind of splash on his clothing, comes home and kisses his wife, and soon millions of people are sick."

Pandemic influenza refers to strains such as the one that killed millions worldwide after World War I, ones that health officials believe one day could come back and be transmitted by migrating birds.

Anthrax analysis

A half-dozen laboratories at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla now receive federal grants to pursue research on anthrax, according to a National Institutes of Health grant database.

Scripps Research Institute officials confirmed that their scientists work with select agents, but declined to say which ones.

Judging from their publications and grants, some of the labs work with a single anthrax gene, harmless when it's separate from the rest of the bacterium.

In others, Scripps safety officials say that workers have to follow strict guidelines governing protective clothing that stays in the lab, disposal of flasks, dishes and pipettes, and disinfection of waste and spills.

"I think it would be extremely difficult for something like that, something that affects the area beyond the lab, to happen in San Diego," said Carolyn Keierleber, biological safety director at the Scripps Research Institute. "Most people working with these kinds of agents understand the rules and the reasons for them."

Most labs at Scripps usually are inspected four times a year, Keierleber said.

"We don't make an appointment, we just walk in," she said.

Select agents and security

Anthrax is one of a group of bacteria and viruses called "select agents," defined by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Agriculture as posing a "severe threat" to human, animal or plant health.

The list includes Ebola and smallpox virus, Yersinia pestis (that causes bubonic plague), anthrax, brucella and foot-and-mouth.

Laboratories that work with select agents must register with the federal government and face strict scrutiny, such as background checks of researchers and security inspections, center spokesman Von Roebuck said.

Roebuck declined to say how many laboratories in San Diego County work with select agents, citing security concerns.

Steve Benedict, UC San Diego's director of environmental health and safety, said that no UCSD labs now work with select agents, although they have in the past and anticipate doing so in the future.

Safety levels

Scripps and UCSD representatives were more willing to discuss a broader measure of biological safety, four "biosafety levels" defined by the National Institutes of Health.

"The level of control attaches to what you're doing and at what scale, in addition to just what the stuff is," Keierleber said.

Each institute has an oversight committee that must approve conditions for each research project, she said.

The bottom level, biosafety level one, could be done in a high school science classroom.

The top level four covers working with the baddest of the bad, such as Ebola or Marburg viruses, which researchers should only handle while wearing a full body suit or in a cabinet with arm-length rubber gloves attached.

Biosafety level three covers work with agents that pose a risk to human health and can be transmitted by aerosol, the tiny droplets that fly whenever someone pours or squirts fluid.

"Everything that comes out of a BSL three lab is disinfected," Benedict said. "And you have to change out of your street clothes."

UCSD's level three labs work on tuberculosis, HIV and HIV relatives such as SIV, which infects some apes. Sometimes lab workers are required to have regular blood tests to check whether their immune systems have reacted to what they work on, he said.

Benedict said that some infectious agents can be worked at less strict levels if they are weakened strains or used in very small amounts.

No laboratory in California is allowed to perform level four research, which is reserved for sites like the Centers for Disease Control and Preventio in Atlanta and Fort Detrick in Maryland.

Incomplete tally

But several laboratories, including six at UC San Diego and four at Scripps Research Institute, are capable of performing level three work, according to their safety officers.

San Diego State has a level three lab. The county's Public Health Laboratory is being brought to level three standards, county health services spokesman Tom Christensen said.

A 2005 National Institutes of Health survey found that 277 "distinct facilities" nationwide are capable of biosafety level three work, although not all institutions responded to the survey. California has at least nine, the survey found.

The La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology last year finished building a level three lab in a building that it shares with the Japanese company Gemini Science, according to the Web site of DPR, the company that built it.

The Salk Institute and the Burnham Institute both said they don't have biosafety level three labs.

Burnham's director of public affairs, Nancy Beddingfield, said that researchers there are interested in level three work, but are restricted by the lack of space necessary for air filters and double doors.

It is unlikely that any private biotechnology companies in San Diego County have level three labs. Few feel that spending money on that construction makes sense, according to Jimmy Jackson, vice president of public policy at Biocom, the life science business association.

For example, the San Diego firm Vical is getting federal grants to develop a vaccine against a potential pandemic influenza strain. However, its financial statements say that all "lethal challenge" animal work with live virus is done at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee.

"The beauty of the technology we use is that we don't have to handle the pathogen directly," said Alan Engbring, Vical's vice president of investor relations.

Security versus practice

Critics of biosafety regulation say that the "select agent" registry is focused more on keeping outsiders away rather than careful daily practice, covered by the national health agency's guidelines.

"We don't properly regulate lab safety in this country," said Hammond of the Sunshine Project. "The NIH publishes guidelines, but not legal obligations."

For example, virologists at the University of Wisconsin were criticized in the infectious disease community for deciding on their own to work with the re-engineered 1918 pandemic flu virus at a biosafety level three facility, according to Science magazine.

After the controversy, the 1918 virus was added to the federal government's select agent list in 2005.

Contact staff writer Quinn Eastman at (760) 740-5412 or qeastman@nctimes.com.

Biosafety experts can point to various recent examples of human error while working with dangerous pathogens.

The British government's report on the initial investigation of August's foot-and-mouth outbreak said "human movement" -- on shoes or clothing, for example -- was the most probable cause of the virus' release, whether deliberate or accidental. Airborne and waterborne transmission were considered unlikely.

"With the amount of virus there is in laboratories around the world, I'm surprised that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often," Juan Lubroth, head of infectious diseases at the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, told The Associated Press about the foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Although foot-and-mouth disease is not considered dangerous to people, a weeks-long outbreak in 2001 forced the British government to restrict travel and tourism in the countryside. At least 6 million animals were slaughtered and the blow to the British economy was estimated at $17 billion.

No laboratories work on foot-and-mouth disease in California.

At the end of June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention halted work at Texas A&M University on "select agents" after the university delayed reporting two separate incidents last year. According to media reports, internal records showed that three lab workers were exposed to Q fever and one became ill after being infected with brucella, both livestock diseases that can infect humans.

In 2004, researchers at the Children's Hospital Research Institute in Oakland injected live anthrax from a lab in Maryland into mice. Reportedly because of a shipping error, the Oakland scientists didn't realize they were handling live bacteria, although none of them became ill.

-- Quinn Eastman