Spotlight: Pentagon under pressure to fix loopholes in anthrax shipment

The U.S. military faces pressure both at home and abroad to correct safety lapses in its anthrax shipment process as Congress held a hearing Tuesday to investigate the issue.

A probe by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) released on July 24 found that a U.S. military lab in Utah had failed to neutralize live anthrax spores and shipped the toxic samples to researchers in 86 laboratories in the country and seven other nations over the past decade.

The DOD found that live spores were sent to labs in 20 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia, as well as countries including Japan, Britain, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Italy and Germany.

Anthrax spores, which are difficult to kill, are neutralized with doses of radiation. Samples are then taken and cultured to see if they continue to grow. If not, they are considered dead.

The Pentagon revealed in its 38-page report that scientific information on inactivating anthrax was inadequate to formulate effective protocols to carry out the task, leaving each defense lab to follow its own procedures.

The lab at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, the one blamed for faulty specimen killing and poor testing in the DOD report, should have realized its procedure was inadequate, but it continued using the same process for inactivating anthrax samples, according to health officials testifying at Tuesday's congressional hearing.

"The failure of inactivation was evident because growth was being detected on multiple production runs," Dan Sosin, a public health official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told the congressional hearing.

"This hearing is astounding, honestly," Representative Larry Bucshon told witnesses at the testimony. "This is anthrax. We should have had policies for decades. It's ridiculous," he said, blaming the recurring lab safety misconducts on a lack of accountability.

At the hearing, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) emphasized the need for a single federal agency to oversee high-containment labs and to develop national standards for lab construction, operation and maintenance -- a detailed proposal concerning improvements in federal oversight, which the institution has repeatedly recommended over the years.

Marcia Crosse, the GAO's director for health care, told the hearing that while none of the recent mishaps have resulted in illness, lax biosafety procedures put scientists and potentially the public at risk.

"We've been lucky so far," she said. "The incidents you are examining today are part of a long series of safety lapses."

With respect to the countries having received active anthrax samples shipped from the United States, South Korea said it will push for a new regulation that requires U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) to notify Seoul anytime an anthrax sample is brought into the country, regardless of whether it's live or inactive.

The statement, issued by South Korea's Defense Ministry the same day as its U.S. counterpart released the probe outcomes, also vowed a thorough investigation into the unauthorized delivery of the active anthrax sample in April to the USFK's laboratory in Osan, about 55 kilometers south of Seoul, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported. Endit