Director of Medical Programs for DoD Chemical and Biological Defense Cdr. Franca Jones demonstrates the protocol for shipping anthrax sample during a news briefing on the DoD Lab Review and Anthrax shipment investigation June 3, 2015 at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The Pentagon announced today the Defense Department may have accidentally shipped live anthrax samples out to at least 51 labs in 17 states, the District of Columbia and three foreign countries.Alex Wong/Getty Images
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of vials containing deadly anthrax spores have been shipped to scores of military, commercial and university laboratories in the United States, Canada and two other countries, top Pentagon officials said Wednesday, admitting that the scale and scope of the problem is far greater than first realized.
However, the risk to the general public is zero and to exposed lab workers extremely low, "close to zero," said Robert Work, Deputy Secretary of Defence.
The spore concentrations in the samples were "far too low to infect an average healthy person," he said.
Perhaps over as long as a decade, at least 51 laboratories in the United States, one in Canada and two others overseas have received vials of anthrax that was supposed to be dead but are now known to have contained live spores.
Dozens of lab workers in several U.S. states are currently receiving prophylactic drugs despite what is considered an extremely low level of risk, said Commander Franca Jones, director of medical programs for the Pentagon's biological warfare unit.
"People have been working with this material for 10 years, but no one has contracted anthrax," Cdmr. Jones said, although it remains unclear if live spores in extremely low concentrations have been shipped from more than one of the U.S. military's four biological warfare labs since 2005.
Supposedly dead spore samples are sent to hundreds of labs as part of an ongoing effort to develop detection and countermeasures. A much smaller number of labs are intentionally sent live spore samples, but the current problem arises out of "killed" spores that have turned out to be alive.
Full-blown investigations are under way by both the U.S. Defence Department and the Centers for Disease Control.
The problem first emerged on May 22, when a lab reported that a supposedly dead sample of anthrax spores was growing in Petri dish. Those samples had been sent from a U.S. Army laboratory at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
At Wednesday's news conference, Pentagon officials said labs in nearly every state as well as the District of Columbia and three countries – Canada, Australia and South Korea – had received spore samples now believed to have come from batches that were not properly killed.
"We know of no risk to the general public," Mr. Work said, adding that he expects the number of labs affected "to change and grow" as the ongoing investigation proceeds.
In Ottawa, the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory has been told by the Pentagon that an anthrax sample delivered in August, 2006, may contain live anthrax spores.
Those vials have been located "in its secure inventory and has confirmed that it has not been used for over five years," the Canadian lab confirmed, adding that "there is very low risk of illness and there have been no reports of illness among the staff" at the lab who worked with the anthrax sample more than five years ago.
At least two serious failures in the U.S. process have already emerged.
Anthrax is a deadly killer favoured for biological warfare because its spores are so small and can be weaponized for delivery by a missile or bomb. Shipped samples were supposed to be killed with massive doses of gamma rays. And then the supposedly dead spores were supposed to be tested to confirm the irradiation had worked.
In at least four batches of the 400 currently being tested, both the killing and the confirmatory testing failed and live spores were detected, Pentagon officials confirmed. It takes up to 10 days to determine if the killing and testing failed, and most of the suspect samples have not reached the end of that period so more live spores are expected to be found.