From USA Today: Congress isn't qualified to investigate the CDC

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-07-02/CDC-congress-investigatio/55987046/1

Congress isn't qualified to investigate CDC

By Alex Berezow

"A recent air leak from a laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta is a very serious security breach that has the potential to harm both employees and the public. These labs study dangerous pathogens, such as influenza, tuberculosis and rabies.

But fear not, Americans: Congress has assembled a team mostly of lawyers to solve this leak problem, which was first reported by this newspaper.

Sadly, that is not an exaggeration. The 54-member House Committee on Energy and Commerce has requested documents from the CDC about the incident. Though the committee does have four medical doctors, not a single member is a scientist. Instead, the panel is stacked with 19 lawyers.

One of the precious few members of Congress who is actually qualified to discuss infectious disease — former microbiologist and public health expert Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y. — doesn't serve on the committee."

...

"But unlike the Roger Clemens steroid scandal — another issue Congress chose to investigate — this topic is actually important. And it should be treated that way.

Indeed, if the claim is true that there are longstanding, systemic problems with biosafety at the CDC, then we simply do not have time to watch the kabuki dance that has become so typical of congressional investigations. Moreover, we don't have time to listen to politicians ramble on about bioterrorism. The pertinent issue before us is the safety of public health research laboratories and not politics, money or the war on terrorism.

Only a CDC-led investigation or an independent commission of experts will be focused enough to understand this.

Given that the current makeup of Congress has demonstrated an inability to understand even basic science, such as vaccines and genetic modification, our fear should be that its involvement would mean possibly several months of professional politicians — most of whom probably don't know the difference between a bacterium and a virus — lecturing lifelong scientists and public health officials on how to run a microbiology laboratory."