The U.S. Army suspended most studies at its primary biological defense laboratory Friday to ensure that all of the site's lethal disease agents are included in inventory records, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Jan. 6).
(Feb. 10) -
Workers are reviewing disease agent holdings at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. (USAMRIID/Getty Images).
"I believe that the probability that there are additional vials of [biological select agents and toxins] not captured in our ... database is high," Col. John Skvorak wrote in a Wednesday memorandum to employees at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. (David Dishneau, Associated Press/Google News, Feb. 9).
It could take as long as three months to count the site's thousands of disease and toxin samples, USAMRIID spokeswoman Caree Vander Linden said, noting that the research freeze was ordered when officials found 20 vials of an animal disease sample in a box expected to contain 16 vials, the Washington Post reported.
Such discrepancies were likely caused by "accounting errors, transcription errors, or [samples] that had not been reassigned when an employee left the Institute," Skvorak wrote in the memorandum.
"They want those freezers cleared out and to find anything that's unaccounted for," one USAMRIID scientist said. "We would find stuff that had been left there by investigators who had departed the institute five years or even longer ago. It was difficult to backtrack what those samples are" (Nelson Hernandez, Washington Post, Feb. 10).
The Army launched a review of the laboratory's recordkeeping system in light of the Justice Department's 2008 assertion that a former employee of the site had singlehandedly carried out the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people in the United States. Microbiologist Bruce Ivins committed suicide last July as federal prosecutors prepared charges against him.
A federal investigation of the attacks traced the anthrax strain in the mailings to a supply developed at the laboratory. Although the supply was included in the sites records, Ivins stored his own sample of the agent in a refrigerator that he alone used.
The Army has bolstered security measures at all of its germ research sites since Ivins's death, said Michael Brady, special assistant to the Army's top officer. Brady was uncertain whether other Army sites have carried out similar research suspensions or inventory checks (see GSN, Dec. 3, 2008).
"We have made it incredibly more difficult for another Bruce Ivins to happen," Brady said, adding that a worker stumbling on an unrecorded disease sample before the security reforms "might have just added it to the database or destroyed it without any notification at all."
Some laboratory employees expressed concern that the new recordkeeping measures were better suited to controlling chemical and nuclear materials, which cannot be cultivated (Dishneau, AP).
"It's extremely difficult to completely account for replicating agents because, by definition, they replicate. ... You can make a large amount from a small amount," said Thomas Geisbert, a former USAMRIID scientist now working as associate director of Boston University's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (Hernandez, Post).
Brady responded: "We have to do something. At the end of the day, we have to figure out the best way forward" (Dishneau, AP).