CDC failed to disclose lab incidents with bioterror pathogens | Emergency Preparedness | Forums

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Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday they have identified 34 incident reports involving bioterror pathogens mishandled at CDC labs that were “inadvertently” not disclosed in 2014 to congressional investigators who had asked for the information.

The reports document inventory issues, specimens in unapproved areas and a few potential exposure incidents that occurred from early 2007 through January 2011, primarily at the CDC’s Fort Collins, Colo., infectious disease laboratory complex, said Steve Monroe, the CDC’s top lab safety official.

All involved certain heavily regulated agricultural viruses — such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus — classified by the federal government as “select agents” because of their potential to be used as bioweapons and cause significant economic harm.

“It was an inadvertent omission,” Monroe said. He said all of the reports have now been given to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which had asked for the information two years ago in the wake of a CDC lab mishap in Atlanta that potentially exposed dozens of workers to live anthrax.

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., the committee's chairman, expressed dismay about the kind of "chronic negligence" that's been revealed in recent years "involving the world's most terrifying pathogens." Someone is going to get hurt, he said.

"And just when we thought the situation could not get any more distressing, it does," Upton said. "We're not talking one or two incidents, but 139 discoveries of select agents in unregistered locations.”  Information about these discoveries was included in the information the committee recently received from the CDC.

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