“Our own defense department is sending these spores around in a way that means that our own government could be releasing these spores”, said Michael Greenberger. The lab alerted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which investigated and found that a sample shipped from Dugway in April was not fully inactivated.
Advertisement
In all, 86 labs have received live anthrax specimens since 2005, the report said, following up on an embarrassing mistake for the military. The labs were the U.S. Army’s facilities at Dugway Proving Ground (DPG) in Utah, and the rest in Maryland – Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Naval Medical Research Center. The Pentagon has condemned the lack of action on the part of the military scientists, who have been accused of slack handling of the deadly pathogen, Anthrax.
Further testing shows 51 labs and counting have received live bacteria, with the Department of Defense continuing to assure that the way the samples are packaged keeps the public safe. This coupled with the short time frame between irradiation and evaluation allowed live spore samples to make it past inspection.
Changes that will be needed include standardization of irradiation and viability testing procedures, sufficient funding and increased review and oversight on DOD biosafety and biosecurity policy and practices. These deficiencies plus other factors resulted in the creation of protocols that don’t permanently or completely sterilize such samples.
The report called for irradiation standards and viability testing procedures to address this “scientific community-wide problem”.
The report adds that the CDC has agreed to consider setting rules or taking other steps to expand the requirements for making sure that BA spores are inactivated. The authorities subsequently said that they had discovered even more suspected shipments of live anthrax than previously thought, both in the U.S. and overseas, prompting the military to order a probe.
The report recommended standardizing and strengthening current pathogen detection protocols.
Advertisement
The review committee consisted of experts from the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security, plus others from the FBI, academia, and industry.
