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CDC investigating anthrax mistake

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno on Thursday said he is confident no one was endangered by a mistake that led to live anthrax samples being sent to government and commercial labs from Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

WASHINGTON – Human error probably was not a factor in the Army’s mistaken shipment of live anthrax samples to numerous U.S. government and commercial laboratories in the U.S. and in South Korea, the Army’s top general said Thursday.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, told reporters the problem may have been a failure in the technical process of killing, or inactivating, anthrax samples. The process in this case “might not have completely killed” the samples as intended before they were shipped, he said.

Odierno said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating that aspect of what went wrong at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army installation in Utah that sent the anthrax to government and commercial labs in at least nine states across the U.S. and to an Army lab in South Korea.

The general said he was not aware that such a problem had surfaced previously at Dugway.

“The best I can tell, it was not human error,” he said, adding that normal procedures had been followed, and he is confident that “nobody is in danger.”

The Pentagon disclosed on Wednesday that at least one of nine labs in the U.S. that received anthrax from Dugway got live rather than dead bacteria.

It has not identified any of the U.S. laboratories by name but said they are in nine states: Texas, Maryland, Wisconsin, Delaware, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, California and Virginia.

Jason McDonald, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said later that 18 laboratories in the U.S. that are believed to have received samples from the suspect anthrax lot that originated at Dugway have been asked to send all of their anthrax samples to the CDC to determine if they are live samples. He declined to identify the labs by name.

McDonald said four people at labs in Delaware, Texas and Wisconsin were recommended to get antibiotics as a precaution, although they are not sick.

Officials said the government labs that received the suspect anthrax from Dugway were at the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia. The rest were commercial labs, which the Pentagon has declined to identify, citing legal constraints. The Edgewood center, which describes itself as the nation’s principal research and development resource for non-medical chemical and biological defense, in turn transferred some samples it received from Dugway to other labs in the U.S.

U.S. officials at Osan Air Base in South Korea said in a statement that the anthrax bacteria it received for training purposes “might not be an inert training sample as expected,” and as a result, the suspect anthrax was destroyed by hazardous materials teams Wednesday. They said 22 people at Osan “may have been exposed” to the live anthrax and were given precautionary medical measures, including examinations, antibiotics and vaccinations.

“None of the personnel have shown any signs of possible exposure,” the air base said in a written statement.

Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday the 22 personnel treated at Osan included 10 members of the U.S. Army and five from the U.S. Air Force, as well as four contract workers and three U.S. government civilians.



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