BioterrorismFollowing accidents, CDC shuts down anthrax, flu labs
Federal officials announced on Friday that they had temporarily closed the flu and anthrax laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s highest-security labs. The announcement followed revelations about two recent accidents involving deadly agents at the CDC campus in Atlanta. Critics said the accidents highlighted an even greater danger – the efforts at some labs to create superstrains of deadly viruses (what is called “gain of function” research). “You can have all the safety procedures in the world, but you can’t provide for human error,” a critic of gain-of-function research said.
Federal officials announced on Friday that they had temporarily closed the flu and anthrax laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s highest-security labs. The announcement followed revelations about two accidents involving deadly agents at the CDC campus in Atlanta.
- Last month, about eighty CDC employees may have been exposed to anthrax after live anthrax viruses, thought to be dead, were moved from high- to low-security lab, where the staff had no high-level protection equipment. The employees were offered a vaccine and antibiotics, and the CDC says no one was in danger.
- A second accident was disclosed Friday. A CDC lab accidentally infected a relatively benign flu sample with a dangerous H5N1 bird flu strain which has killed 386 people since 2003. The U.S. Agriculture Department laboratory realized that the strain was more dangerous than expected and alerted the CDC. Though the contamination was discovered on 23 May, senior CDC officials were not informed until 7 July, and Dr. Tom Frieden, head of CDC, was not told until last Wednesday.
- CDC also announced Friday that two of six vials of smallpox recently found stored in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland since 1954 contained live virus capable of infecting people. The samples will be destroyed after the genomes of the virus in them is sequenced.
The head of the lab has since been reassigned.
The New York Times reports that the mishandling of the anthrax viruses, and the CDC’s strong response to the mishap, may well have serious consequences for the many labs which store and handle high-risk agents, especially to those few labs where controversial research is being conducted on making these agents even more dangerous in order develop defenses against them.
Observers note that if the CDC had experienced several accidents which could, at least in theory, have killed not only staff members, but also people outside the lab, then demand will grow for even tighter controls on the university, military, and private laboratories where such research is being conducted.
CDC said that the anthrax and flu labs will remain closed until new safety procedures are imposed. The flu lab will re-open in time for vaccine preparation for next winter.
