CDC probes error causing live anthrax shipments

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The U.S. Army’s top general said Thursday that human error probably was not a factor in the Army’s mistaken shipment of live anthrax samples from a chemical weapons testing site that was opened more than 70 years ago in a desolate stretch of desert in Utah.

Samples from the anthrax lot ended up at 18 labs in nine states and an Army lab in South Korea, leading more than two dozen people to get treatment for possible exposure.

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.

Odierno said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what went wrong at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army installation in Utah where the anthrax originated.

Officials said the government labs that received the suspect anthrax 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.

Some of the samples sent from Utah were also transferred to other labs in the U.S. by the Edgewood center, a research and development resource for nonmedical chemical and biological defense.

CDC spokesman Jason McDonald said four people at labs in Delaware, Texas and Wisconsin were recommended to get antibiotics as a precaution, although they are not sick. U.S. officials at Osan Air Base in South Korea said 22 people were being treated for possible exposure.