From the "you can’t make this stuff up" file comes news that the National Institutes of Health is 70% finished with a bioterrorism lab that would examine microbes like anthrax, smallpox, and Ebola located in . . . the center of Boston.

Rick Weiss of the Washington Post reports on a A review by the National Research Council examined NIH’s risk analysis for the microbe-filled lab and one review board member noted that "on a pass-fail basis . . . it would have failed."  The NRC report did not exclude urban-based laboratories of this kind in principle, but specifically the NIH’s approach in Boston, which local citizens have been protesting for nearly five years.  Nonetheless, of the NIH’s four such facilities planned for completion in 2008, only the Boston site was actually in a crowded urban setting.

The NRC uncovered an arcane attempt by the NIH risk assessment team to push through a false comparison of urban and rural sites:  they sampled a disease, Rift Valley fever, that spreads quickly in rural areas because it uses mosquitoes and cows as hosts; the absence of cows in a city setting made it seem, relatively speaking, safer than the rural one.

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