Coffee Poisoning Struck 6 at Harvard

The Wall Street Journal reports that six Harvard University Medical School employees who became ill in August after drinking coffee from the same coffee machine were poisoned with sodium azide, a preservative commonly used in laboratories.

From WSJ

The school doesn’t know how the poisoning occurred, according to David Cameron, spokesman for the medical school, and no one has been disciplined. Harvard University police are investigating, along with the city of Boston’s Public Health Commission and the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The single-serve coffee machine was in a common area on the eighth floor of a facility called the New Research Building. After drinking the coffee on Aug. 26, one employee reportedly passed out and others felt dizzy. Five were treated and released that day from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one was kept overnight, according to Friday’s letter, signed by Daniel Ennis, the medical school’s executive dean for administration, and Richard Shea, associate dean for physical planning and facilities.

“HMS leadership is committed to doing everything possible to understand what may have occurred,” the two officials wrote

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New Report Calls Nuclear Terrorism Risk Unacceptably High

A new report says the world still faces a serious risk that terrorists could obtain a nuclear bomb and urges President-elect Barack Obama to make reducing that risk a top priority of U.S. security policy and diplomacy. VOA correspondent Meredith Buel has details from Washington.

The new report, called “Securing the Bomb 2008,” says major progress has been made to reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism.

The report warns, however, there are still major gaps in these efforts and says the risk of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon remains unacceptably high.

The author of the report, Harvard professor Matthew Bunn, says the potential for a disastrous attack is very real.

“That would incinerate the heart of a major city,” he said. “It could turn the center of Washington, D.C. or the center of Manhattan into a smoking, radioactive ruin that would be unusable for decades to come. That would have profound and catastrophic affects on our society, really reverberating around the world.”

The study is the seventh annual report from Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonproliferation group based in Washington, D.C.

The report details a series of events around the world in recent years it says highlights the risk of poor security at nuclear installations.

These include an armed break-in at a South African site with hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium, the arrest of a Russian colonel for soliciting bribes to overlook violations of nuclear security rules and the increasing terrorist threats amid the ongoing strife in Pakistan.

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