DurhamHerald-Sun

Task force enlisting UNC faculty By ERIC FERRERI : The Herald-Sun ericf@herald-sun.com Oct 20, 2001 : 8:41 pm ET

CHAPEL HILL -- From his office at UNC Greensboro, biologist Neal Stewart has watched the still-unraveling series of anthrax scares with a keen eye.

An expert in plant biotechnology, Stewart works on projects that someday may help governments detect bioterrorism.

For now, he’s just frightened about what has happened -- and about what still could.

Stewart says someone in New Jersey, the origin of at least two anthrax-tainted letters, may still have a stock of the potentially deadly bacterium.

"He’s teasing politicians and news media with it," Stewart said. "He’s going to release it somewhere. If he releases it on a city and there’s no early detection, there’s not much you can do. To me, the letters are just a taste of things to come. They’re teasers."

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have worked feverishly, but without luck, to find the source of the anthrax. At the same time, agencies in North Carolina have begun preparing for worst-case scenarios that could arise if bioterrorism reached the state.

To that end, Gov. Mike Easley has enlisted a team of bioterrorism experts from across the UNC system -- including Stewart -- to help advise state officials.

"We’ve got some tremendous resources in this state, some tremendous resources at our universities," said Fred Hartman, Easley’s press secretary. "The governor wants to make sure we bring all those resources to the table."

The group will be part of a larger group of state officials who will be part of a state terrorism task force.

The faculty group has expertise in areas from plant technology -- Stewart’s bailiwick -- to contamination of water supplies. The six faculty members -- including Bill Roper, dean of UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health -- met with Easley two weeks ago and also discussed aspects of bioterrorism earlier this week with members of the state’s congressional delegation in Washington, D.C.

"The value is that we can provide more information than you can get out of CNN," said Russ Lea, a UNC system vice president coordinating the group’s efforts. "When people get some information, they often want more. That’s when you need a scientist."

The group mines its information from broad backgrounds involving decades of research, and most, if not all, receive federal funding.

Stewart has received Environmental Protection Agency money to study the detection of bioterrorism agents in municipal water supplies. Another of his projects involves the genetic engineering of plants that, potentially, could provide an indication if they came into contact with a chemical agent.

Stewart also is trying to create algae that detects chemicals, a way of protecting water supplies, he said.

Jim Riviere, an N.C. State University pharmacologist, generally works in two separate but distinct areas. For years, he has worked both on cutaneous toxicology -- the study of chemical absorption through the skin -- and separately on food supply safety.

With the attacks of Sept. 11 and the subsequent anthrax scares, those two seemingly disparate fields appear to him to be coming together.

"They just gelled," he said. "It’s a frightening situation."

The expertise Riviere offers to the governor’s office largely involves the potential contamination of food supplies, an issue that experts have had to re-examine since Sept. 11.

"It’s hard to know what kind of scenario is likely to occur," he said. "Any book written on it was thrown away [on Sept. 11]. Two months ago, we never would have thought outside the box."

Riviere is involved with a national food safety hot line at N.C. State through which veterinarians and others in the agriculture industry can call with questions and concerns about food issues. It’s a service and bank of knowledge that may be prepared for a bioterror attack, having already been put through a drill last year during a scare over foot-and-mouth disease, which emerged in England when hoards of cows became contaminated.

"They got a handle on some emergency responsiveness," Riviere said. "It was a dry run. Luckily, nothing ever happened [in North Carolina] with that."

The other faculty members involved with the governor’s office include Roper; Marty Roop, a microbiologist at East Carolina; Bernie Dougherty, a criminal justice professor at Western Carolina and former assistant director of the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service; and Bill Cooper, a UNC Wilmington chemist who works with decontamination and water supply issues.

Roper, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before coming to Carolina, couldn’t be reached for comment this week.

Cooper, the UNC Wilmington chemist, believes water supplies are a potential area for contamination.

Creation of drinking water happens in three steps: supply, treatment and distribution. While some contaminants can be added to water in the supply stage -- at reservoirs or in lakes — not all can survive the treatment process. Thus, the distribution stage is the most susceptible to bioterrorism, Cooper said.

"Water treatment systems are basically unprotected, and the potential of something happening exists," he said. "[But] it would be a very difficult task, chemically, to contaminate a water supply because it’s such a large volume of water."

In rare cases, a contaminant sneaks through the whole process. That happened in Milwaukee in the mid-1990s when cryptosporidum, a naturally occurring parasite, got into the drinking water supply without being filtered out. It killed 106 people.

-- Anonymous, October 21, 2001