Canada got lucky – or maybe it was wise – when it decided to build a world-class infectious diseases centre in Winnipeg.
The federal government spent $180 million building the complex system of human and animal disease laboratories that opened in 1997, not realizing that within a few years the country would be thrown into crisis by both severe acute respiratory syndrome and bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
“One thing that we didn’t know was coming along, and wasn’t part of the planning of this building, was BSE,” said Peter Wright, deputy director of the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease.
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“That was out of the blue.”
The centre will become the hub of a new testing regime being developed to ensure BSE-afflicted animals cannot get into the human food chain.
Beginning in 2004, thousands more animals per year will be tested for hidden BSE infections, improving Canada’s safety controls.
The centre will serve as a “reference centre” for provincial government and university labs across the country that will do the day-to-day BSE testing in slaughtered cattle.
Any signs of BSE or worrisome material will be referred to the Winnipeg centre, where the nation’s leading experts will be able to analyze them and compare them to its extensive tissue and data banks.
It will also be able to keep the scattered labs up to date with information and new methods, Wright said during a tour of the facility by the Manitoba Farm Writers and Broadcasters Association. “We’re keeping our knife edges honed.”
The towering Winnipeg lab’s exterior gleams with bright white walls and glass faces, its appearance not giving away its reality as a maximum security prison for the world’s deadliest diseases.
Deep inside the centre, well away from the friendly exterior, behind foot-thick walls, sealed doors and air locks, sit tiny amounts of human diseases such as ebola and SARS, and animal diseases such as foot-and-mouth, chronic wasting disease and BSE.
Here scientists carefully experiment with these dread plagues to find ways to combat them if they ever appear in Canada.
Diseases such as foot-and-mouth, hog cholera, avian influenza and Newcastle disease are longtime problems that were well known when the centre was conceived and built.
But it was merely fortuitous that the centre went into operation just before Canada was struck with the most recent human and animal disease threats.
But while it was fortuitous, Wright denies it was luck.
“This is due to the far-sightedness of people who saw the need for a centre like this,” he said.
But even though this is the world’s newest disease centre able to study the most dangerous diseases, small elements are already outdated.
A modest room near the front of the complex, which is now used for meetings and presentations, was originally designed to be the command centre for the control of future disease outbreaks.
The terrorist attacks in 2001 suddenly made that location seem insecure.
“After 9-11, everything changed,” Wright said.
“We said, ‘what if we’re a target? Where’s our command post? It’s in the middle of the target.’ “
There are few labs in the world that can do the kind of work undertaken in Winnipeg because few countries can afford to invest in these kinds of facilities.
But Wright said the almost $200 million price tag only looks big if it is taken out of context.
“They are expensive labs, but when you compare that (cost) to the $21/2 billion we lost due to that one cow, that one case of BSE, it doesn’t seem like a lot of money.”
