After potentially serious back-to-back laboratory accidents, federal
health officials announced Friday that they had closed the flu and
anthrax laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and have halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s
highest-security labs.
The accidents, and the CDC’s emphatic
response to them, could have important consequences for other
laboratories engaged in efforts to produce dangerous viruses and
bacteria.
If the CDC — which the agency’s director, Dr. Thomas
Frieden, called “the reference laboratory to the world” — had multiple
accidents that could, in theory, have killed both staff members and
people outside, there will undoubtedly be calls for stricter controls on
other university, military and private laboratories that handle
pathogens.
In one accident, which occurred last month, as many as
75 CDC employees may have been exposed to live anthrax bacteria after
potentially infectious samples were sent to laboratories unequipped to
handle them. Workers who were not wearing protective gear ended up
moving and experimenting with samples of the highly infectious bacteria
that were supposed to have been deactivated. All the workers were
offered vaccine and antibiotics, and the agency said that no one was in
danger.
In another episode, disclosed Friday, a CDC lab
accidentally contaminated a relatively benign flu sample with a
dangerous H5N1 bird flu strain that has infected 650 people since 2003,
killing 386 of them. Fortunately, an Agriculture Department laboratory
realized the strain was more dangerous than expected and alerted the
CDC.
In addition to those mistakes, Frieden also announced Friday
that two of six vials of smallpox recently found stored in a National
Institutes of Health laboratory since 1954 contained live virus capable
of infecting people.
All the samples will be destroyed as soon as
the genomes of the virus in them can be sequenced. The NIH will scour
its freezers and storerooms for other dangerous material, he said.
“These
events revealed totally unacceptable behavior,” Frieden said. “They
should never have happened. I’m upset, I’m angry, I’ve lost sleep over
this, and I’m working on it until the issue is resolved.”
The anthrax and flu labs will remain closed until new procedures are imposed, Frieden said.
At
the CDC, Frieden said, staff who knowingly failed to follow procedures
or who failed to report dangerous incidents would be disciplined. A
committee of experts will be convened to revise procedures.
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