Pentagon finds its protocols for handling anthrax weak, inconsistent

Each military lab developed its own procedures for handling the anthrax, Work said, and all seem to be following those procedures.

The Department of Defense says that the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah failed to completely kill samples of anthrax in May before it shipped them to dozens of other labs around the world.

Dugway scientists were using Cobalt 60 gamma radiation to kill or deactivate anthrax specimens before shipping them to government or private labs for further research, the CDC report said.

The recent shipment that launched multiple federal investigations occurred on April 20, when an Anthrax sample that was thought to be inactivated, or killed, was routed through the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland and forwarded to six private-sector companies, the review stated. But the report and DoD officials refused to say who came up with those protocols. As the subsequent testing were conducted, investigators found that live anthrax had already been sent to 86 facilities across the country and overseas. In footnotes throughout, the report dwells on how difficult it is to kill anthrax, but no one would explain why, if it is so hard to kill, DoD allowed one lab to use minimal protocols. “It was absolutely inexcusable”. “DOD takes full responsibility for the failures”.

“The low numbers of live spores found in inactivated DoD samples did not pose a risk to the general public,” the report read. The testing may have failed to find live spores because sample sizes were too small or incubation periods too short, it said.

Beginning in May, the Pentagon noted that a number of states and countries including the United Kingdom, South Korea, Australia and Canada had reported receiving questionable anthrax samples. Dugway officials should have recognized and corrected the problem, he said.

Kendall said when investigators asked Dugway about their failure rate, officials there said it was 2-3 percent. They answered that it was about two to three percent. The initial DoD report found there was no single human culprit outside the Dugway chain of command.

The deputy secretary said he wanted to determine whether the accidental delivery was a one-time failure or a “more systemic problem” in DoD’s biohazard safety procedures, and he assembled a team of experts from the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Homeland Security, the FBI, academia and industry.

The review pointed to “knowledge gaps” in the effectiveness of protocols used to render live spores inert for testing, and said that all the laboratories investigated “relied more on historical practices than validating the processes used”. Work went on to say there was nothing reckless going on in the labs.

– Of the 96 batches to test in DoD inventory at Dugway Proving Ground, 17 of 33 tested positive for re-growth/live anthrax. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is responsible for tracking those shipments, however, and it is actively chasing the samples down. And so the individual institutions, like Dugway, have crafted their own. The facilities have been under a shipment moratorium since the Dugway issues were discovered, the report says, noting that the Navy facility was not now involved in inactivating anthrax.

Anthrax is most risky when it spreads through the air and gets into lungs.

“There is no legitimate military or civilian objective that requires inactivated anthrax from fully virulent strains”, Ebright said.

All of the labs to which the samples were sent were free to send samples on to other places, and so the Department of Defense has been unable to account for all of the samples.