Newspaper: Tech professor carried plague on airlines

LUBBOCK, Texas — The Texas Tech University researcher accused of lying to the FBI about missing plague vials has carried live samples of the bacteria aboard commercial airlines, a newspaper reported.

The attorney for Thomas Butler said the professor's method of transporting specimens of the plague-causing organism yersinia pestis, or YP, was safe.

Lawyer Floyd Holder said Butler secured the samples — taken from infected Tanzanians — in a plastic container in his luggage.

"He described it to me that it would be impossible to break it with a sledge hammer," Holder said in Saturday editions of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. "It was absolutely safe to transport it the way he did."

Butler brought the samples from Tanzania to Tech in April 2001. Holder said the samples were preparatory work for a $700,000 grant he was seeking from the Federal Drug Administration to study medical treatments for plague.

Butler cultured the Tanzanian plague samples in his lab at Tech before delivering samples to Army medical research in Maryland, Holder said. Butler then took samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention office in Fort Collins, Colo.

Vickie Sutton, a lawyer, scientist and director of Tech's Center for Biodefense, Law and Public Policy, disagreed with Holder's statement that Butler's transportation of the bacteria was safe.

"The very reason that we have controls for these select agents is because there's a public health risk," Sutton said.

"Now if there's something wrong, why didn't the CDC say, 'Tom, how did you get this stuff into the country?' " Holder said. "They know how he got it in, and they approved of it and ratified it."

Butler is charged with making a false statement to a federal agent in an incident that sparked a bioterrorism scare last month.

According to court records, Butler gave a handwritten statement to the FBI saying he had accidentally destroyed 30 vials and that he made a "misjudgment" in telling authorities they were missing.

He said he didn't realize his story would result in "such an extensive investigation," according to court documents.

Butler, who was chief of the infectious diseases division of the department of internal medicine at Tech's medical school, has been involved in plague research for more than 25 years and is internationally recognized in the field.

The university has placed Butler on paid leave, changed the locks on his laboratory, blocked him from computer access and barred him from campus.

You think he's being framed? Or just don't like the pic/comment? ...

No, I don't think he's being framed. It's just that given the types of carrying containers that are used, it's safer for him to escort the material than to simple send it off by itself. Besides, YP is a common disease of rabbits that people only occasionally get. That's what's behind the saying that if you can catch a (wild) rabbit using your bare hands, you shouldn't eat it. YP is being studied as a biowarfare agent but it's already out there in the natural environment the same as bubonic plague. A few people happen to get either every year.

The people criticizing him for taking it on board a plane are the same folks who take away a fingernail clipper because it could be used as a weapon but allow a pen with a metal body that could be used much more effectively as a weapon. "Imagine what could happen if the YP happened to get out!" Yeah, imagine what could happen if a passenger happened to decide to hold the point of his ballpoint against the eyeball of a female flight attendent and demand access to the cockpit. The danger doesn't lie in the object. There is a far greater likelihood of a passenger using a ballpoint to commander the plane than a microscopically small amount of YP spontaneously escaping from a sealed transport device. I'm speaking from the standpoint of someone in biological research.

I wonder why he lied to the authorities and why they are pursuing this? Something we don't know is in the background, perhaps ...

From what I remember, he had accidentally destroyed some samples and said they were missing. In these days, "missing" is seized on as "has been stolen by terrorists bent on infecting millions of innocent U.S. citizens." Better to have just taken the lumps for having destroyed them without the proper paperwork than to have been the cause of hysteria and be labeled a quasi-terrorist.

Here's this from a Texas paper back on January 15. It explains a lot. Notice that it appears that the FBI charged him with lying because he said the samples were missing and later concluded they had been destroyed. You know, "Hey, you reported them missing but concluded later they had been destroyed. Since they weren't missing, what you said was not the truth. A lie is not the truth. You lied to us, you bad, bad man (and made us look like fools)." After the FBI scrambled 60 agents and did a full-hysteria press, they certainly don't want to look like feebs, so, yeah, they'll try to keep him looking like a bad guy as long as possible.

That Butler had access to the potentially lethal pathogen is not surprising. Butler, 61, has been responsible for groundbreaking research on the disease for 30 years, according to his colleagues.

"He is one of a handful of persons in the United States that has had extensive research experience on the plague, beginning in the early 1970s," said Dr. David Dennis, a retired scientist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who continues to advise the federal agency. "He did some of the important work on the understanding of the disease and how it causes illnesses and how best to treat it."

Butler studied the plague in Vietnam and Taiwan in 1969 and 1971 while with a U.S. Navy research unit. He wrote a book on his findings titled Plague and Other Yersinia Infections, which scientists called a landmark in the field.

But Thursday, Butler was just another inmate at the Lubbock County Jail, held without bail and charged with lying to the FBI.

_________

Butler said he first noticed the vials were missing Saturday, according to an FBI affidavit. When he had not located them by Tuesday, he notified the dean of the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, who in turn called local, state and federal health and law enforcement agencies.

The FBI rushed to Lubbock, and a task force involving 60 officers worked through the night and into Wednesday.

The affidavit states Butler admitted to FBI agents Wednesday that he had accidentally destroyed the vials.

"Because I knew that the pathogen was destroyed and there was no threat to the public, I provided (an) inaccurate explanation . . . and did not realize it would require such an extensive investigation," Butler wrote in a statement to the FBI, according to the affidavit.

Only Butler and perhaps federal agents know for certain how the bacteria vials could have been accidentally destroyed, but other scientists said it is not hard to imagine likely scenarios.

Strains of pathogens and other bacteria are routinely destroyed when research on them is completed, Straley said. It is possible that during a routine cleaning of the deep-freeze unit where bacteria are stored, a wrong rack was thrown in with items slated for destruction, she said.

"Anytime anybody cleans out their freezer and reorganizes them, there's always a possibility you could throw out a (wrong) strain," Straley said. "I could understand how somebody could accidentally destroy strains without any kind of malicious intent to be destructive."

Straley, who knows Butler, also said it is possible that Butler didn't lie about the missing vials but honestly did not remember what happened to them until pressed about it by investigators.

"It would not be something discovered right away. It might not be discovered until the next time you went to do an experiment," Straley said.

Dennis, the adviser to the CDC, said Butler's recent research was part of a resurgence in interest in the plague in recent years. The disease remains a serious public health problem in much of the world, particularly in Madagascar as well as East Africa and parts of Asia, he said.

Butler was testing the effectiveness of new antibiotics on the disease.

"I think the work he has been doing and been proposing to do has been important," said Dennis, who lives in Fort Collins, Colo.

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