NUECES COUNTY, Texas — You may not realize this, but Nueces County is home to one of the state’s biological safety laboratories. That’s important to know especially when a hurricane threatens our area.
Our lab actually stores biologicals like anthrax, botulism and even the plague. There’s a system in place to ensure those potentially don’t escape the lab in case a hurricane damages the facility.
The Nueces County Health Department has scientists working in its laboratories mostly every single day, especially since the pandemic began. It has had to analyze about 5,000 COVID-19 tests. Now, these scientists here are also certified to handle biological material like botulism and anthrax. Before Hurricane Hanna hit, those biologicals were being stored here.
"The policy is written by the Centers for Disease Control that if you have an imminent threat of a hurricane you have to destroy all the biologicals," Health Director Annette Rodriguez said. "That’s because if something was to compromise your building and the walls fell down and the virus got out you could actually cause worse harm to the community.“
Those dangerous biologicals were all incinerated.
So why are those toxins and diseases stored here? Well, it's so the CDC can check to make sure the lab is properly storing the materials.
The government sends the labs the test kits so they can call the scientists here and check to make sure they handled the material correctly and know what it is under a microscope.
"We actually use them to validate that our staff is competent at their job so ever so often, CDC will check and do like a test and say 'now it’s time for you to do a test and we want you to go to row C column D and we want you to take that and run it and see what you got', and we run it and we come back and say we’ve got botulism, they say 'yes that’s exactly what you were supposed to find,' Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez said that the government probably will not send any more of the toxins and diseases down to the lab here until after hurricane season.
She did say that if another storm approaches our area, COVID-19 samples that are being kept here are considered a biological. They would be ordered to be incinerated as well before a hurricane hit.
For the latest updates on coronavirus in the Coastal Bend, click here.
For the latest updates on Hurricane Hanna, click here.