The US Military shipped live anthrax across 9 states?! What?! On accident, of course.
The samples sent to a Maryland lab via FedEx were supposed to be dead, but they were not. A dead sample has less rigorous standards of shipping than a live sample does, so when the sample arrived and was found to be alive during a culture, there was a cause for concern.
The Department of Defense claims that it poses no risk to the population, but four workers across the nine states as well as twenty two laboratory professionals have been given the appropriate medical precautionary measures including vaccines, antibiotics, and examinations and (whew) none of them are showing any symptoms.
The samples have been destroyed and the labs decontaminated, but it still leaves all other military, government and commercial labs that could have received a shipment of live anthrax checking their inventory. The samples found to still be alive in Maryland came from a laboratory in Utah, where specimens left over from the shipments were also found to be alive. The CDC is conducting on-site investigations at these labs, and the DOD won’t be sending any more of this material out until the investigation is complete.
Col. Steve Warren, Pentagon spokesman, said one sample was sent to The Joint United States Forces Korea Portal and Integrated Threat Recognition Program at Osan Air Base. Why were these samples being shipped in the first place? Col. Warren responded,
“The DOD lab was working as a part of a DOD effort to develop a field-based test to identify biological threats in the environment.”
A defense official stated that typically, the samples would have been irradiated to kill the bacteria prior to shipping, and its not yet clear who goofed. The other states samples were sent to were Texas, Wisconsin, Delaware, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, California and Virginia.
