US agency halts pathogen shipments after security breach

Reacting to anthrax and H5N1 influenza virus shipments from one lab to another in the recent past, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has suspended shipments from its high-biosecurity facilities.

The US disease agency has also shut down the laboratories responsible for the anthrax and H5N1 incidents, pending an investigation, Nature reported.

"I am disappointed by what happened and frankly, I am angry," agency director Thomas Frieden told a press conference.

The CDC's actions come on the heels of another biosafety scare earlier this month when unauthorised vials of smallpox were found in a cold storage room on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

According to a CDC report released this week, at least five such incidents have happened in the past decade in which CDC shipments of potentially viable pathogens were improperly inactivated or wrongly believed to be harmless.

"These are wakeup calls. These are events that tell us we have a problem, and we are going to fix it," Frieden added.

The news of anthrax exposure broke June 19. The CDC began investigating why its lab workers did not follow proper procedure to inactivate Bacillus anthracis spores before shipping these to another lab.

The receiving lab was not equipped to handle the pathogen.

Once the mistake was discovered, more than 70 people were pre-emptively treated for anthrax infection, the Nature report added.

In March this year, the CDC's influenza lab contaminated a harmless flu strain with the highly dangerous H5N1 variety, and sent it to a laboratory operated by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Athens, Georgia.

The mistake was discovered May 23 but according to Frieden, he was not notified until July 9.

According to the CDC, it will work with an external scientific advisory panel to examine safety procedures at all of its high-level biosafety labs before resuming any shipments to internal or external labs.