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Pentagon Halts Work at Labs For Dangerous Pathogens After Anthrax Scare
An anonymous reader writes: The Pentagon announced yesterday it is issuing a moratorium on work at nine different biodefense labs after live anthrax was discovered outside containment at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The facility was discovered to have been shipping live anthrax specimens — instead of dead ones — to other labs. Work can only begin again after the shuttered facilities are certain to be clean of anthrax and assured of safe conduct. "The review calls for the military labs to ensure that personnel are properly trained on lab safety procedures and that necessary maintenance is conducted on biosafety level 3 lab facilities that work with some of the most dangerous pathogens. It calls for validating record-keeping and inventories of the military's 'Critical Reagents Program' — including 'ensuring that all materials associated with the CRP are properly accounted for.'"
Han Solo: [sounding official] Uh, everything's under control. Situation normal.
Voice: What happened?
Han Solo: [getting nervous] Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"If you can't keep your toys in your room, then you won't be playing with them at all. No, I really mean it this time."
The scientists' dessert privileges were also revoked in an unrelated incident.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
You don't need intelligence to follow procedure, you need to follow procedure to follow procedure. That's why there's a procedure to follow.
#whatcouldpossiblygowrong ...
Anthrax is found everywhere in nature. All over the globe. And it has been around for all of recorded history.
It has been a staple of anyone who works with wool or sheep, and even back in the earliest recorded medical history the effects of the bacteria have been present. It's been documented since the ancient greeks and egyptians.
Anthrax was even one of the first biological weapons, ancient Romans around bombarded cities with anthrax-diseased sheep corpses.Google brings up the name Manius Aquillius (150BC) as a commander who frequently used infected corpses in warfare.
This isn't like they sent out a nuclear bomb core. Some people didn't irradiate samples of a naturally occurring bacteria than can be easily collected on every continent already, it is even found on Antarctica.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Uranium and Arsenic can be found in many places too. It's the human-refined versions which are a bit more troublesome.
Toxicity is always a matter of concentration.
I work in the parent organization for the lab in Edgewood Maryland. The lab in Utah belongs to a different command. I'm going to say what you probably expect me to say, which is that we've got really good people. We have people whose work was used in Africa against Ebola, who are working on bar-coding spores, synthetic biology, scanning suspicious mail for the White House and the UN, etc. If you remember the mission during which the U.S. neutralized the Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles, all the actual scientists and engineers but one or two came from our labs, and they also designed the equipment and went to sea to do the de-mil. You may remember it as the Cape Ray mission, but it should probably have been called the Edgewood mission.
One non-obvious reason people work for the Army is that we do things nobody else needs to do. So, for example, Edgewood lab is the only place in the country certified to remove level 4 hazards from explosives. You can't get that kind of excitement just anywhere.