Pentagon Blames Anthrax Fiasco on … No One At All

For over a decade, the U.S. military shipped a deadly biological agent around the globe. But the Pentagon can’t find a single “root cause” for this monumental goof.

A Pentagon report designed to explain how a military lab sent live anthrax to 86 locations worldwide could not find a “single root cause” for the worst biosafety mishap in decades. Nor does the report finger any individual or group for the blunder, The Daily Beast has learned.

Instead, the report blames the shipments of deadly bacteria to 21 states and seven nations over the last decade on the lack of a common scientific standard for killing anthrax, also known as bacillus anthracis. It’s a claim that some experts rejected as an attempt to whitewash sloppy military practices.

A highly anticipated 38-page draft report viewed by The Daily Beast focused on a Dugway Proving Ground, the Army base that produced all the activated anthrax spores sent around the globe. The report concludes that “a single root cause for shipping viable BA [bacillus anthracis] could not be identified” but considers the “primary systematic issue” a lack of “specific validated standards to guide the development of protocols, processes and quality assurance measures.”

The report finds that Dugway failed to use enough radiation to kill anthrax and it did not correctly conduct subsequent tests to confirm the anthrax was dead. In footnotes throughout, the report dwells on how difficult it is to kill anthrax. On that, outside scientists and the Pentagon agree. But the scientists also note that commonly accepted procedures, when used correctly, would not allow a lab to unknowingly send activated anthrax spores, as Dugway did for a decade.

The report blames the shipments of deadly bacteria on the lack of common scientific standards. It’s a claim that some experts rejected as an attempt to whitewash sloppy military practices.

The report notes that no other lab within the U.S. government handled as much anthrax as Dugway did. It concludes that the Department of Defense should develop standards across its four labs that handle such dangerous pathogens. It also recommends that the U.S. Army assess whether anyone from its Dugway facility should be punished or removed for the lab’s failings.

But experts said those recommendations are not enough.

Richard Ebright, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, rejected the Pentagon’s claims that the shipment of live anthrax spores was solely the result of a lack of scientific consensus. Indeed, he called Dugway’s practices “criminally negligent.”

To Ebright, Dugway’s use of such practices over a decade, despite numerous signs that the methods were insufficient, indicates an unsafe lab.

Ebright believes the Pentagon is hiding behind a lacking scientific consensus and a federal standard to avoid making changes at a dangerous facility.

“The errors had nothing do with scientific uncertainties. This was a mismanaged industrial operation,” Ebright said. “The errors were avoidable at many different steps.”

“Dugway runs an industrial production program—not a science program,” Ebright added. “The recipients of the spore samples were military contractors and military bases—not scientists.”

To be sure, there are no federal standards for how to kill live anthrax spores. But that is because another government agency, the Centers for Disease Control, consistently has refused to set them. And so the individual institutions, like Dugway, have crafted their own standards.

The Pentagon report said there were “deficiencies” in the lab’s radiation dosing, which refers to the amount of radiation used to inactivate the spores.

Dugway took procedures that had been shown in the scientific literature to be barely sufficient to inactivate a million anthrax spores and applied them to production batches containing trillions (millions of millions) of anthrax spores.

[link to www.thedailybeast.com]