Faulty protocols behind
live anthrax shipments to labs: Pentagon
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[July 24, 2015] By
David Alexander
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The shipment of live
anthrax spores to researchers in the United States and seven other
countries was "a failure" that exposed "a major problem" in Defense
Department handling of the deadly bacteria, U.S. Deputy Defense
Secretary Robert Work said on Thursday.
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Releasing a 38-page report on the investigation of the shipments to
researchers at 86 facilities, Work said that although few live
spores were found in the samples and no one was infected, the
incident raised huge concerns.
"By any measure this was a massive institutional failure with a
potentially dangerous biotoxin," he told a Pentagon news conference.
"The first thing we had to know was: Why did it happen?"
He said the investigation into the shipments of live anthrax, which
were first discovered in late May, uncovered no single root cause
for the problem. Instead, officials found that ineffective protocols
plus the practice of inactivating large batches of anthrax at a
single facility had led to the problem.
Four Defense Department facilities ship inactivated anthrax to
research labs in the United States and abroad to help develop
medical countermeasures to protect troops in the event an adversary
uses anthrax as a biological weapon.
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Work said a surprising finding of the investigation was that the
broader scientific community lacked the technical information to
guide the development of effective protocols for inactivating
anthrax spores. As a result, the four Defense Department labs
created their own protocols.
All four labs followed their protocols, but they were different at
each site. At one, Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the doses of
radiation failed to sterilize the anthrax spores, and testing done
afterward failed to detect the live spores, the report said.
Work said that was partly because of the size of the batch and the
short time between irradiating the anthrax and testing it again to
see if live spores still existed. The report found anthrax is hard
to kill and can repair itself in some cases.
The inadvertent shipment of live anthrax spores came to light on May
22 when a private company notified the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention that inactivated spores in its possession
were live.
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The investigation found live spores were sent from Dugway to labs in
20 states and the District of Columbia, plus Japan, Britain, South
Korea, Australia, Canada, Italy and Germany.
"Of the total batches in Dugway's inventory, more than half tested
positive," Work said. "Obviously when over half of those anthrax
batches that were presumed to be inactivated instead are proved to
contain live spores, we have a major problem."
The deputy defense chief said the number of research facilities that
received spores from Dugway could still grow because some facilities
shared them with fellow researchers.
He said he had directed Army Secretary John McHugh to conduct a
formal investigation of the actions that led to the unintended
shipment of live anthrax.
"This was a failure that the Department of Defense is taking full
responsibility for and we need to ... establish procedures that will
make sure this won't happen again," he said.
(Reporting by David Alexander; editing by Eric Beech, Peter Cooney
and Andrew Hay)
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