51 labs now said to get live anthrax

Shipment errors thought to go back to 2005; little risk seen

WASHINGTON — At least 51 laboratories in 17 states and three foreign countries received potentially live anthrax spores from the Defense Department over the past decade, and the number is likely to grow, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The scope of the problem remains unclear, but Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said at a news conference that the problem poses little risk to public health because the suspected anthrax was shipped in low concentrations and secure packaging.

Work said no one is known to have been infected with anthrax as a result of the mistaken shipments. He said the errors at the originating Army laboratory at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah were at least twofold.

The anthrax was supposed to have been killed with gamma rays by Defense Department lab technicians before being shipped for use by commercial labs and government facilities in research and the calibration of biohazard sensors. But for reasons not yet explained, the anthrax remained alive.

To compound the error, follow-up lab tests to verify that the anthrax had been killed before being shipped apparently failed.

One question for the ongoing investigation is whether a sufficiently large sample size of the irradiated anthrax was used in the verification tests, or whether those follow-up tests were even performed.

Officials said the mistakes appear to have begun in 2005 or 2006, although Work said the Pentagon did not become aware of them until alerted May 22 by an unidentified commercial lab in Maryland. That lab reported that supposedly dead anthrax samples it received from an Army laboratory contained live spores.

Navy Cmdr. Franca Jones, director of Pentagon medical programs for chemical and biological defense, told reporters that 31 people are receiving antibiotics as a precaution, but none is sick.

She said 19 of the 51 laboratories that received suspected anthrax have submitted it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing. Of nine samples fully tested thus far, all nine have proved to contain live anthrax.

“We’ll find more” labs received the suspected anthrax than the 51 notified thus far, Jones predicted, since more than 400 master batches of anthrax at four Defense Department laboratories that are responsible for shipping it to commercial laboratories have yet to be tested.

Of four batches fully tested thus far — all at Dugway Proving Ground — all four have been determined to contain live anthrax, even though the material had undergone irradiation in accordance with a well-established but apparently flawed protocol for killing the anthrax.

Jones said the samples from those master batches were shipped as long ago as 2006. She did not provide a full timeline for the shipments, although some were received in recent months.

The three other Defense Department labs that are authorized to perform similar functions with anthrax are in Maryland, according to a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Steve Warren.

He said the Pentagon is legally prohibited from disclosing the names of the dozens of commercial laboratories in 17 states and the District of Columbia that received suspected anthrax. They are in California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina and the District of Columbia.

The scope of the problem has grown almost daily since the Pentagon first acknowledged it publicly May 27.

On that date, the Pentagon reported that labs in nine states were affected. A short time later it said the suspected anthrax also had been received at a U.S. military facility at Osan Air Base in South Korea.

By the end of the week the number had grown to 25 labs in 11 states plus Australia and Canada. At that point, Work ordered a comprehensive review of laboratory procedures associated with killing live anthrax.

Work said the Pentagon will take steps to hold people accountable for the lapses once the CDC has completed its investigation into what happened at Dugway.