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December 5, 2009

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Editorial: Update state’s lab to handle bio scares

Wednesday, March 12, 2003 | 8:48 a.m.

A Las Vegas man committed suicide Feb. 28 by injecting a biotoxin into his body. On the way to the hospital, the dying man told responders he had injected himself with ricin, a deadly poison whose very mention raises fears of terrorism. His last words triggered a full emergency response. Since Sept. 11 local officials have trained long and hard to confront such incidents and the training paid off. An operations center was quickly established and procedures were quickly and smoothly instituted.

There was one problem, unfortunately, and it was beyond the control of the emergency responders. A small container with a substance suspected to be ricin inside was confiscated from the man's home and taken to the Nevada State Health Division Laboratory in Reno. The lab, however, was not equipped to test the substance and it was forwarded to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. It wasn't until Monday, 10 days after the incident, that the substance was positively identified as ricin. The next incident might require a much quicker identification. In this day and age of bioterrorism fears, the health division's lab should be upgraded to test for such threats as ricin.

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