Related: Pentagon anthrax blunder reveals ‘chain of errors’ in government lab protocols
One week after the terrorist attack in New York on 9/11, another attack on the US began. Letters containing spores of anthrax, a weaponised bacterial agent, were posted to the offices of several newspapers and two Democratic senators. Twenty-two people were infected. Five died.
Anthrax is a bacterium often found in soil, according to Jerrold Leikin, a doctor who co-edited a book on “toxico-terrorism”. Its spores are one to five microns across – small enough to get into human lungs. The initial symptoms of infection look like flu, but quickly progress to sepsis, hemorrhagic meningitis and death. Once it progresses to those last stages, the fatality rate is around 95%.
Over the last few weeks, it was revealed, anthrax was sent to 52 laboratories in 18 states plus South Korea, Canada and Australia. Thirty-one people received treatment for possible exposure. In 2014, a similar incident saw 75 people possibly exposed to the pathogen.
The difference is this: the first incident was a terrorist attack. The second and third were accidents. Samples of the pathogen that were supposed to be inactivated were sent to laboratories by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2014 and the Department of Defense most recently.
The origin point of this year’s accident was Dugway proving ground in Utah, a military facility which produces anthrax in industrial quantities for the purpose of military research – detection, mainly, and as a countermeasure.
The post-9/11 era saw a huge expansion in the security state. The bioweapon industry was no different. After the 2001 anthrax attacks – known to some as “Amerithrax” – there was a 20- to 40-fold increase in the number of institutions and individuals working with biological weapon agents like anthrax, according to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biosecurity expert at Rutgers university.
In response to questions from the Guardian, a spokesperson for the CDC said there were 181 “organizations or entities” such as Dugway registered as working with live anthrax, and 321 in total working with live pathogens.
Within those 321 entities, according to the Government Accountability Office, there are some 1,495 laboratories accredited under the Federal Select Agent Program to work with live pathogens such as anthrax, and a much larger number working with inert versions of the same pathogens.
There is no official government body to oversee production and research of bioweapons that does not – as the CDC does – engage in its own active pathogen research, and no apparent fixed official guidelines regarding their handling.
Human beings are relatively resistant to anthrax compared to smallpox. But that’s not something we should rely on
After the CDC’s own accident with anthrax in 2014, it said it would hold an official investigation and issue a set of binding guidelines. No such comprehensive set of guidelines appears to have been issued and it is unclear exactly under what authority the CDC could bind, for example, the Department of Defense. A spokesperson for the CDC told the Guardian that it “and [the US Department of Agriculture] work jointly on regulating and overseeing the work done on select agents”.
However, 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 said “no single federal agency was responsible for assessing overall laboratory needs”.
According to Ebright, basic rules, such as having at least two people in a lab at any one time, or even that accredited laboratories should have CCTV cameras, do not exist in many such facilities.
Information regarding the latest breach is relatively scarce. Army chief of staff Raymond Odierno told reporters “the best I can tell there was not human error”.
“The fact that this has been obviously happening for some time and perhaps at several different places hints at a systemic issue,” said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Morse, who also worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) between 1995 and 2000 on biodefence, 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.”
Indeed, according to Ebright, military contracted laboratories across the US routinely work with other, more dangerous pathogens than anthrax – including several virulent strains of avian flu. A mistake with one of those, instead of anthrax, could have devastating results, including “a global pandemic”.
Nominally all such labs are working on defences against these pathogens. But it has become, Ebright said, “all pork-barrel”, with at least one lab in every single state.
“[It’s] spending that can’t possibly be defended on any rational basis,” he 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 programmes 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.”
But according to Ebright, the real issue isn’t a question of danger to the public from the accidental sending itself. It’s the chance that the pathogen – which was the same strain used in the 2001 attack – could fall into the wrong hands.
It’s all about the worst you could possibly have: no-one watching, no rules and no accountability
“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 US, precisely by distributing a highly lethal strain of the agent with no structure and no ability to record where they have gone.”
Nor is this the only slip-up that has been made at Dugway. In 2011 the base was placed on lockdown for several hours after a vial containing a deadly “nerve agent” went missing, the BBC reported at the time.
“The major concern is the security breach, that the material will be transferred to domestic terror and international terror and be used as the seed source for a bomb or weapon,” said Ebright.
“It would be disappointing if the Department of Defense becomes the supplier for al-Qaida that enables a bioweapon attack.”
