Anthrax possibly sent to Pentagon

WASHINGTON — Six days after the Pentagon first revealed that live anthrax was mistakenly shipped from an Army facility in Utah, the military acknowledged on Tuesday that it still does not know the full extent of the problem.

CNN reported that the Defense Department is investigating to determine whether live anthrax was brought into the Pentagon, and military officials added Washington state and Canada to the locations where labs received potentially live anthrax samples from the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground. The new disclosure brought to 12 the number of states that received the suspect anthrax. Live anthrax also was sent to Australia and South Korea.

“The department is in the process of determining the scale and scope of this,” Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said. “The department’s shipment and transport of anthrax spores has stopped.”

There have been no known cases of anthrax exposure, and Warren said “there is no risk to the public at this point.”

But the shipments suggested that the military’s careful procedures for dealing with the deadly pathogen had been breached. The Pentagon said last week that 22 personnel at the Osan Air Base in South Korea had started taking the antibiotic Cipro as a precautionary measure.

One of the shipments was for police at the Pentagon, where it was to be used to calibrate security sensors that screen for chemical and biological weapons, two defense officials told CNN.

The Canadian government on Tuesday said it had received a shipment from the United States that might have contained live bacterium but that there were no reported illnesses. The Public Health Agency of Canada said it received the sample in August 2006 but it had not been used for more than five years and was moved to a secure laboratory.

Before the disclosure on Tuesday, the Pentagon had said that 24 commercial, university or military research labs in 11 states plus South Korea and Australia had received the shipments.

The 11 states are California, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.

A Maryland lab, which first notified the CDC, is the only research center known to have cultured live anthrax from the sample it received.

Information from Reuters was included in this story.