No government agency oversees handling of deadly pathogens in 1,495 U.S. labs

No government agency oversees handling of deadly pathogens in 1,495 U.S. labs

Published 9 June 2015

 

According to the CDC, 181 “organizations or entities” in the United States are registered as working with live anthrax, and 321 in total working with live pathogens. Within these 321 entities, roughly 1,495 laboratories are accredited under the Federal Select Agent Program to work with live pathogens such as anthrax. There is no official government agency to oversee production and research of bioweapons that does not – as the CDC does — engage in its own active pathogen research. “Even one spore is a sufficient seed stock from which an amount could grow to mount a biological weapons attack,” says one expert. “The sad circumstance is that this massive effort [U.S. research on anthrax] since 2001 has dramatically increased the chances of a biological weapon attack on the U.S., precisely by distributing a highly lethal strain of the agent with no structure and no ability to record where they have gone.”

The recent anthrax scare in which the bacteria was sent to fifty-two laboratories in eighteen U.S. states and South Korea, Canada, and Australia, is just another example of poor accountability among the nation’s labs tasked with researching and developing defenses against deadly pathogens.
The Pentagon disclosed last Wednesday that it inadvertently shipped anthrax to the labs, but it has yet to determine how the mistake happened, who is to blame, and why it was not discovered earlier. “We know of no risk to the general public,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work told a Pentagon news conference, adding that the anthrax was shipped in low concentrations and in secure packaging. According to thee Guardian, the anthrax was supposed to have been killed with gamma rays by Pentagon lab technicians before being shipped for use by commercial labs and government facilities in research and the calibration of biohazard sensors.
In 2014 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent what was supposed to be inactive anthrax to U.S. labs, exposing seventy-five people to live versions of the pathogen. The origin point of this year’s accident was Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, a military facility which produces anthrax in industrial quantities for military research.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biosecurity expert at Rutgers University, attributes the recent anthrax accidents to the increasing number of federally-backed labs tasked with working on bioweapon detection and prevention following the post-9/11 anthrax letter attacks, in which letters containing spores of anthrax were posted to the offices of several newspapers and two Democratic senators. Twenty-two people were infected. Five died.
“(It’s) spending that can’t possibly be defended on any rational basis,” Ebright said. “With each of the incidents in the past there has been a notable absence of responsibility. They know if you mess up, nothing happens; the programs aren’t reduced, the personnel suffer no consequences. So it’s all about the worst you could possibly have: no one watching, no rules, and no accountability.”
According to the CDC, 181 “organizations or entities” such as Dugway are registered as working with live anthrax, and 321 in total working with live pathogens. Within these 321 entities, roughly 1,495 laboratories are accredited under the Federal Select Agent Program to work with live pathogens such as anthrax. There is no official government agency to oversee production and research of bioweapons that does not – as the CDC does — engage in its own active pathogen research.
A 2013 Government Accountability Office report found “a continued lack of national standards for the design, construction, commissioning, and operation of high-containment laboratories” and concluded “no single federal agency was responsible for assessing overall laboratory needs.”
After the CDC’s 2014 anthrax accident, the agency said it would issue a set of binding guidelines for labs handling deadly pathogens, but no comprehensive guidelines have been issued. It is also unclear what authority the CDC would have over the affected labs, including those operating under the Defense Department. A spokesperson for the CDC told theGuardian that it “and (the U.S. Department of Agriculture) work jointly on regulating and overseeing the work done on select agents.”
Stephen Morse, who worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency between 1995 and 2000 on biodefense and is now a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said accidents involving live pathogens in U.S. labs hint at a systemic issue, and speculated that the process by which machines irradiate the live pathogens, inactivating them, might be “poorly calibrated.” “Luckily for us, human beings are relatively resistant to anthrax compared to smallpox,” said Morse. “But that’s not something we should rely on.”
Ebright is concerned about what could happen should actors gain access to one of the many labs handling deadly live pathogens. “Even one spore is a sufficient seed stock from which an amount could grow to mount a biological weapons attack,” Ebright said. “The sad circumstance is that this massive effort since 2001 has dramatically increased the chances of a biological weapon attack on the U.S., precisely by distributing a highly lethal strain of the agent with no structure and no ability to record where they have gone.”
“It would be disappointing if the Department of Defense becomes the supplier for al-Qaeda that enables a bioweapon attack.”