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Five Researchers Accidentally Exposed To Anthrax Live
Fri Jun 11, 2004 03:18
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Five Researchers Accidentally Exposed To Live Anthrax
[ Post 292710063 ]



Category: News & Opinion Topic: International Affairs
Synopsis:
Source: Rense.com
Published: June 10, 2004 Author: Paul Elias

Five Researchers Accidentally
Exposed To Live Anthrax

By Paul Elias
AP Biotechnology Writer
6-10-4


http://www.rense.com/general53/res.htm 

SAN FRANCISCO - At least five workers developing an anthrax vaccine at a children's hospital research lab in Oakland were exposed to the deadly bacterium because of a shipping foul up, officials reported Thursday.


Officials with the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute said none of the researchers have shown symptoms of infection, but are being treated with antibiotics as a precaution.

Hospital spokeswoman Bev Mikalonis said the researchers believed they were working with a dead version of the anthrax bacterium, but were instead shipped live anthrax by the Frederick, Md. lab of the Southern Research Institute, which is headquartered in Birmingham, Ala.

Mikalonis said other workers may have also been exposed while the live anthrax was being handled and that federal, state and local officials - including the FBI - are investigating.

The hospital doesn't believe that anyone was infected because researchers used proper procedures and precautions while handling the anthrax shots. The Oakland lab itself is located about one mile from the Children's Hospital and Mikalonis said exposure doesn't pose a threat to the hospital and surrounding community.

The researchers are working with dead bacterium to develop an anthrax vaccine that children can use. Anthrax attacks killed five people and sickened 17 others in 2001 in the United States. No one has ever been arrested for the killings, but the attacks spurred development of better vaccines and treatments for anthrax than are currently available.

Mikalonis said the Oakland researchers received and stored a shipment of what they thought to be dead anthrax from the Southern Research Institute about three months ago.

Last week, the Oakland researchers began injecting anthrax from the shipment in mice as part of an experiment. On Monday the mice unexpectedly began to die. On Wednesday night, California state health officials confirmed their worst fears: live anthrax was in the syringes. Agents with FBI's bioterrorism unit removed the samples from the lab Wednesday.

Southern Research Institute's Thomas Voss, who is in charge of homeland security and emerging infectious disease, said the nonprofit company is investigating what happened. Voss said it's still unclear whether the institute did ship live anthrax to Oakland.

"We aren't totally sure of the sequence of events," Voss said.

The Southern Research Institute was founded in 1942 and has two highly secure "hot labs" that store some of the world's most deadliest diseases. Labs and researchers from around the country that need data about those nasty diseases but don't - or can't - handle them contract with the Southern Research Institute to do that work.

Voss said the institute's hot labs in Frederick and Birmingham handle just about every "select agent" listed with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The institute is one of 350 entities registered to handle live anthrax with the CDC. It employs 600 people nationwide and has about $75 million in revenue a year, Voss said.

Voss said that while the institute receives many shipments of live diseases, it rarely ships them out.

"We receive agents on a routine basis," Voss said. "But on our end, we ship very infrequently. I can't even recall shipping live agents."

The mishap will surely be seized on by critics of the government's effort to combat biological terrorism by paying for the construction or expansion of 18 high-containment labs across the country.

Supporters of the building boom said the additional lab space is needed to combat emerging global threats, but critics said such expansion increases the likelihood of accidents like the one Oakland reported Thursday.

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FLASHBACK:
White House Staff put on Cipro before anthrax attacks
Prior Knowledge of Anthrax Threat
http://infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/bush_cipro.htm 

OCTOBER 24, 10:32 EDT White House Mail Sorters Anthrax-Free By SANDRA SOBIERAJ
Associated Press Writer
President Bush
AP/Susan Walsh [15K]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Preliminary anthrax tests on some 120 White House mail sorters turned up no sign of exposure to the bacteria on Wednesday. President Bush said he's confident that the people inside the gates at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. are not in danger. ``There have been no results that have come back with a positive measure of anthrax,'' White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, reporting on the screens done so far on about 120 of the 200 workers who have had contact with potentially contaminated White House mail. Those being tested work at a remote, Secret Service-controlled facility across the Potomac River on property shared by the Anacostia Naval Station and Bolling Air Force Base. Although officials say they are confident no tainted mail actually reached the White House complex, workers at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House were also tested. window.name="video_window";

Thompson promises quick action
QuickTime RealVideo

``We're making sure that the West Wing, the White House is safe,'' the president said Tuesday after a trace of anthrax was found on a machine that opens White House mail at the screening facility several miles away. That offsite facility at Bolling was shut down Tuesday morning. Between three and eight workers on loan from the U.S. Postal Service had access to that contaminated machine where a trace amount — anywhere from 20 to 500 spores — of anthrax was found, a senior law enforcement official said. At least 8,000 spores must be inhaled into the lungs to get the most deadly form of anthrax. Substantially fewer spores can cause the highly treatable cutaneous form of anthrax if they enter a cut in the skin. window.name="video_window";

Asked if he was tested for the germ that has killed three people already this month, or if he was taking precautionary antibiotics, Bush replied simply: ``I don't have anthrax.'' At least some White House personnel were given Cipro six weeks ago. White House officials won't discuss that, or who might be receiving the anthrax-treating antibiotic now. ``If the White House were to start to reveal the security measures including health protections that are in place for the president ... people who would want to do harm to the president would know what protections are in place and therefore they could shift their tactics,'' Fleischer said. On the night of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House Medical Office dispensed Cipro to staff accompanying Vice President Dick Cheney as he was secreted off to the safety of Camp David, and told them it was a precaution, according to one person directly involved. At that time, nobody could guess the dimensions of the terrorists' plot. Now, Bush said on Tuesday, ``There's no question that the evildoers are continuing to try to harm America and Americans.'' Regular biohazard testing inside the White House had been stepped up after last month's attacks and, as of Tuesday afternoon, found no traces of anthrax, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said. Security officials were apparently spooked even before Tuesday's discovery at Bolling, which handles mail processed through Washington's Brentwood postal facility, and halted mail delivery to the White House complex several days earlier. ``We have not seen mail in a while,'' said a West Wing aide. A staffer on campus at Bolling, in southeast Washington, said the same was true there. Two postal workers at Brentwood died of pulmonary anthrax — one on Sunday, the other on Monday. Brentwood is where the anthrax-tainted letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was processed before delivery. In a statement, the Secret Service said no one connected with the mail facility at Bolling has reported anthraxlike symptoms. Postal and health officials have said it's possible for one anthrax-tainted letter to contaminate another, meaning the anthrax found on the Bolling machinery could have come from a letter that mixed with other mail at Brentwood. Experts believe it unlikely that a cross-contaminated letter would have contained enough anthrax to make someone sick.
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Bacteria "came from US government lab"

London Times
November 22, 2001

Bacteria "came from US government lab"

The anthrax attacks in America are "almost certainly" derived from a US government laboratory, a scientist says. "I'm a New Yorker," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chairman of the Federation of American Scientists' working group on biological weapons. "My city has been attacked, first by foreign terrorists, then by an American using a biological agent." Rosenberg was representing one of a number of arms control groups that urged a 144-nation conference in Geneva to tighten restrictions on germ warfare in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The anthrax used in letters sent to addresses in New York City, Florida and Washington, "was derived, almost certainly, from a US defence laboratory," said Ms Rosenberg. She said the anthrax attacks "demonstrated the incredible potency" of using disease as a weapon but was only a small taste of what is possible". Four people have died as a result of the toxin.

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http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/Army%20sent%20anthrax%20strain%20to%20only%205%20labs.htm 
Army sent anthrax strain to only 5 labs 11/30/01Steve Fainaru and Joby Warrick
Washington Post
Since the mid-1980s, the U.S. Army laboratory that is the main custodian of the virulent strain of anthrax used in terrorist attacks distributed the bacteria to just five labs in the United States, Canada and England, according to government documents and interviews. Two of the labs - both in the private sector - received the strain this spring, only a few months before letters tainted with anthrax spores were mailed to New York and Washington, the records show. Col. Arthur Friedlander, senior military research scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., said the Ames strain was distributed by the military for research under strict controls to "legitimate workers in the field." FBI spokesman Mike Kortan said yesterday that the agency's anthrax probe had moved "way beyond" the short list of labs that received the Ames strain from Fort Detrick. Transfer records obtained by the Post under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Army agency in Frederick, Md., shared the Ames strain last March with scientists at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, an Albuquerque research institute, and in May and June with the Battelle Memorial Institute, a Columbus, Ohio, corporation involved in anthrax vaccine research. No records were available before 1997, when a new federal law required researchers to report the transfer of dangerous pathogens to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But Army officials said the other labs to receive Ames were the Defence Research Establishment Suffield, a Canadian biodefense institute that received Ames in 1998; the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, a test facility in the Utah desert that received the bacteria in 1992; and the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down, a British biodefense institute near Salisbury, England, which received the Ames strain in the mid-1980s. "This is not a cavalier thing that one does," Friedlander said. "When anyone isolates strains, they are shared through the scientific community. That's how research gets done. It follows a long tradition of collaboration with people that we are well familiar with." The Ames strain, a virulent form of the bacteria, is named for the Iowa city where it was originally isolated. It was used in attacks that killed five people and infected 13 in Florida, New York, Connecticut and Washington, D.C., according to investigators. When the anthrax attacks began in early October, many experts believed that the Ames strain, because of its use in vaccine studies, had been distributed to thousands of researchers worldwide. But that number has been found to be much lower in recent weeks. Friedlander estimated yesterday that the numbers of labs in possession of virulent anthrax strains, including Ames, probably numbered "no more than a dozen." In addition to the five labs that received Ames from the Army, others known to have the Ames strain are Martin E. Hugh-Jones, an anthrax researcher at Louisiana State University, and a lab at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz. Jones recently said he received the Ames strain in the late 1990s from microbiologist Peter Turnbull, then at Porton Down. Turnbull, confirming the transaction in an interview last week, said Porton Down shared Ames with "very few" researchers, whom he declined to name. The records document the delivery of Ames bacteria to at least 10 establishments, but only five received Ames in a form that makes people sick. The first agency reported to have received the Ames strain from Fort Detrick was the Chemical Defence Establishment, which used the bacteria to test vaccines for troops. Porton Down scientists previously acknowledged sharing the bacteria with the agency's public health branch, the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research. The center's officials in turn have acknowledged distributing the bacteria to a small number of private researchers. Fort Detrick's documents record several exchanges of Ames bacteria between Fort Detrick and the Dugway Proving Ground, the Pentagon's primary chemical and biological defense testing center, in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert. Dugway, the site of several biological weapons tests in the 1950s and 1960s, has continued to use live anthrax spores in experiments that test the durability of military equipment under a simulated biological attack. Michael Cast, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command, which oversees Dugway, said the security measures at the West Desert Test Center, where Dugway scientists test everything from protective suits to armored vehicles, are "very stringent." In 1998, the Canadian government requested the Ames strain for its Defence Research Establishment Suffield, Ottawa's counterpart to Fort Detrick. According to documents prepared by that agency's scientists, Ames was one of 11 strains of Bacillus anthracis bacteria given to Canada. The Canadians studied Ames in experiments that tested the effectiveness of antibiotics against various bacterial strains, documents showed. The Canadian agency's chief scientist, Kent Harding, said the anthrax spores were closely guarded against theft. "We're talking several locked doors and 24-seven monitoring," he said. Two research agencies received Ames bacteria from Fort Detrick this year, in shipments that predate the Sept. 11 attacks. Battelle Corp., a major government contractor that manages Energy Department laboratories and operates the Chemical and Biological Information Analysis Center for the Defense Department, was planning to use the strain in developing vaccines. Spokeswoman Katy Delaney said she could not comment on Battelle's anthrax research, but she said officials were unaware of security problems at its facilities. "We know of no instances of safety or security breaches in our biodefense research," Delaney said. The records also show that the Army shared Ames with the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center last March. The center operates a Pentagon-funded lab that evaluates potential treatments and protections against biological weapons. A university spokesman declined to comment on the specifics of the research. While initial tests have s

• How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing — Edward Everett Hale, Fri Jun 11 04:18