Despite in-house concerns about safety, Aberdeen Proving Ground is competing to build a $150 million Army plant that would use live microbes to manufacture germ-warfare vaccines for all U.S. troops.
Other military installations seeking the project, which would employ as many as 200 civilians, include Fort Detrick in %o Maryland, Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, officials said.
The production of large quantities of vaccines against anthrax, botulism and other germ-warfare agents requires that the microbes be grown and processed. Antigens are extracted to produce the vaccines.
Fort Detrick in Frederick once seemed the logical choice for the factory, which could be as large as 325,000 square feet, but Aberdeen and other bases have joined the chase, according to various officials.
"No decision has been made," Harvey Perritt, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said Friday. He said the Army still may hire a private company to build the vaccine factory on nongovernment property.
Unannounced lobbying to bring the project to Aberdeen began last fall.
The proving ground would be an "ideal" location for the vaccine factory, Col. John M. Taylor, Aberdeen's deputy commander, said in a memo to the Army Materiel Command.
"We have an aggressive environmental compliance and achievement program that is capable of handling waste products and assisting in resolving any and all environmental concerns," he wrote.
The Sun recently obtained a copy of the memo.
But the installation's commander, Maj. Gen. Richard W. Tragemann, and others initially were worried about safety and whether surrounding communities would accept such a plant.
"Not sure we want the vaccine [factory] here," General Tragemann said in a handwritten internal memo dated Sept. 12, also obtained recently by The Sun.
"We have a hard enough time supporting [environmental and safety controls for] what's already here," the memo said. Later, General Tragemann agreed to seek the factory.
The Pentagon has identified the vaccine plant as an "urgent and compelling need"; the U.S. military went to war in the Persian Gulf with no reliable source of vaccines against the anthrax and botulism weapons the Iraqis were thought to possess.
Of the 500,000 U.S. troops who served, about 160,000 received vaccinations to protect against anthrax and botulism. The rarely used or experimental vaccines are among the many suspects being investigated in the search for the cause of veterans' ailments collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome, thought to affect up to 20,000 troops.
Last month, news reports said the Russian military was secretly developing more powerful biological weapons for which Western nations have no antidotes.
In addition to improved vaccines for anthrax and botulism, the Army's Science and Technology Master Plan lists numerous vaccines the service wants to obtain during the next decade, including those to counter bacteria that cause plague and brucellosis, encephalomyelitis viruses and ricin toxin -- all deadly or debilitating agents that could be used in weapons.
"Sometimes we use attenuated [or less dangerous] organisms, sometimes we use pathogenic organisms" to produce vaccines, said Anna Johnson-Winegar, director of Fort Detrick's medical biological defense program.
She said that, in general, quantities of infectious agents involved in vaccine production would range up to 500 liters at a time -- 130 gallons. Amounts currently used for research are only a fraction of that.
The vaccine factory, to be licensed and inspected by the Food and Drug Administration, also would have an animal facility, where the vaccines would be tested using infectious agents.
According to Army planning documents, the factory would have what the military calls Biosafety Level 3 containment to protect workers, guard against airborne releases of agents and prevent "cross-contamination within the production suites."
Protective measures include sealed rooms and ventilation systems that draw potentially contaminated air toward filters.
The facility, according to the planning documents, also would have a "decontamination sewer" with a capacity of 150,000 gallons per day. The sewer would collect potentially contaminated liquids and carry them to steam sterilization equipment.
Critics of the U.S. biological warfare defense program, on which the military is spending an estimated $80 million a year, say the vaccine factory raises the same safety questions that have existed for years concerning related research work at places such as Fort Detrick and Dugway Proving Ground near Salt Lake City.
"You are going to be working with some of the most dangerous substances known to man," said Andrew Kimbrell, an attorney for the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends.
"I would tell any community to stay as far away from that program as they can," said Mr. Kimbrell, whose group has forced the military in court to prepare environmental impact statements on the biological defense research program.
But Army officials at Aberdeen, Fort Detrick and elsewhere respond that the vaccine factory can be operated safely.
"If we had thought it could not be built, operated and maintained in a safe manner . . . we don't want it here," said Gary Holloway, an Aberdeen spokesman.
Aberdeen, about 15 miles from Baltimore in Harford County, and Fort Detrick are surrounded by large and growing suburban communities.
Fort Detrick, about 45 miles from Baltimore, has a 50-year history of biological warfare research and production. Since about 1970, the work has focused on ways to defend against germ warfare, primarily the development of vaccines.
"There has never been a release outside the laboratories," said Fort Detrick spokesman Norman M. Covert.
Three deaths have occurred at Fort Detrick, in the 1950s and 1960s, from exposure to anthrax and viral encephalitis, he said. Throughout Fort Detrick's history, 424 "laboratory-acquired" infections of military and civilian workers have occurred. All but five infections happened before 1970.
But Aberdeen has traditionally been a research center for VTC chemical warfare and conventional weapons such as tanks and artillery.
In recent years, researchers in the proving ground's Edgewood area have focused more attention on biological warfare defense.
Until the mid-1980s, 20 percent of the work at the proving ground's Chemical and Biological Defense Command and its predecessor agencies was related to biological warfare. Now the proportion is about half.
Mickey Morales, a spokesman for the defense command, said the research on protective clothing, battlefield detectors and other gear uses only organisms that have been rendered noninfectious.
In recent years, Aberdeen's 75-year-old research and testing mission has come under increasing scrutiny from regulators and communities in Baltimore, Harford and Kent counties. The proving ground expects to spend up to $1 billion in the next 15 years cleaning old, leaking toxic dumps and ground water contamination.
Aberdeen has been hit with three state and federal fines in the past year for lapses in handling hazardous chemicals.
More recently, two citizen watchdog groups petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to add the proving ground's 57,000-acre Aberdeen area to the federal Superfund list of the nation's worst toxic waste sites.
Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, a Republican from the 6th District, which includes Fort Detrick, last week asked the Pentagon for a briefing on the status of the vaccine factory proposal.
The congressman, while acknowledging that other installations want the plant, said it should be built at Fort Detrick because "they have the history, they have the knowledge, they have the infrastructure."
Last fall, when Aberdeen Proving Ground began considering the project, officials tried to enlist the support of Rep. Helen Delich Bentley, a Republican from the 2nd District, which includes Aberdeen.
However, an aide to Mrs. Bentley said last week that the congresswoman, a candidate for governor, has supported Mr. Bartlett's effort to place the factory at Fort Detrick.
But he added: "We certainly would like Aberdeen considered if Detrick is found to be unacceptable."