Medical Research Ruined in Katrina Flood

Here is an excerpt from an article by Paul Elias posted on the Associated Press newswire this morning with regard to medical research efforts derailed by Katrina, such as the world-famous Bogalusa Heart Study:

About 300 federally funded projects at New Orleans colleges and universities worth more than $150 million including 153 projects at Tulane were affected in some way, according to an initial survey by the National Institutes of Health.

One of the biggest blows is the likely destruction of frozen urine and blood samples from thousands of patients enrolled in the Bogalusa Heart Study, the world’s longest-running racial study of risk factors for heart disease.

Samples collected and frozen since 1973 thawed out when the hurricane knocked out electricity and backup generators failed at a Tulane lab in New Orleans.

“It’s irreplaceable. That’s decades of research,” aid Dr. Paul Whelton, senior vice president for health sciences at Tulane. “It makes you want to cry.”

If the blood and urine samples are damaged or contaminated, future tests can’t be done using them. However, Bogalusa’s chief researcher, Tulane cardiologist Dr. Gerald Berenson said he had analyzed much of the data already collected and saved it on his computer, which was not damaged.

“The Bogalusa Heart Study will go on,” said Berenson who visited New Orleans, but not his lab, on Tuesday. “We’ll just have to pick up the pieces from what we have.”

Tulane cancer specialist Dr. Tyler Curiel was one of the few researchers who decided to ride out the hurricane in New Orleans in an effort to salvage decades worth of research.

After the storm passed, Curiel spent the first few days transferring vials from broken freezers to liquid nitrogen tanks with the help of a flashlight.

He later fled to his in-laws’ house in Denver and then returned to his lab for a day, grabbing whatever he could in an effort to save blood and tissue samples from an ongoing ovarian cancer project.

One thin silver lining to all the lab damage: It appears that no deadly diseases were released from the area’s “hot labs,” where researchers routinely handle and store some of the world’s most dangerous germs.