Posted on 05/29/2015 3:55:35 AM PDT by markomalley
The U.S. Army’s top general said Thursday that human error probably was not a factor in the Army’s mistaken shipment of live anthrax samples from a chemical weapons testing site that was opened more than 70 years ago in a desolate stretch of desert in Utah.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, told reporters the problem may have been a failure in the technical process of killing, or inactivating, anthrax samples. The process in this case “might not have completely killed” the samples as intended before they were shipped, he said.
Odierno said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating that aspect of what went wrong at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army installation in Utah that sent the anthrax to government and commercial labs in at least nine states, including Wisconsin, and to an Army lab in South Korea.
Officials said the government labs that received the suspect anthrax were at the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia. The rest were commercial labs, which the Pentagon has declined to identify, citing legal constraints. The Edgewood center, which describes itself as the nation’s principal research and development resource for non-medical chemical and biological defense, in turn transferred some samples it received from Dugway to other labs in the U.S.
CDC spokesman Jason McDonald said four people at labs in Delaware, Texas and Wisconsin were recommended to get antibiotics as a precaution, although they are not sick. U.S. officials at Osan Air Base in South Korea said the anthrax bacteria it received for training purposes “might not be an inert training sample as expected,” and as a result was destroyed by hazardous materials teams Wednesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at leadertelegram.com ...
Bttt
This country is gone. Total anarcho breakdown of government on all levels. Only a year and a half to go and it’s going to be a hell ride. For the most part I’m a bystander and I’m watching in amazement as the predicted worst case unfolds. Bad stuff seems far removed from my space but I know it can reach me in a heartbeat. Am I ready? I guess I’ll find out when the time comes, some on the other side may find out too.
The microbiologists that received the anthrax should have handled the material as if it were radioactive and used all precautions just as if it were live. That is the rule of micro because one never knows if an incident like this can happen. In a graduate course in infectious diseases my unknown in the lab was anthrax, albeit an attenuated strain.
About a year ago when ISIS made their move on Iraq, they made a bee line to Saddam Hussein’s bunker that contained WMDs mainly bio weapons.
The military tried every way possible to get Obama to bomb the bunker and seal it but Obama refused.
They didn’t know for sure what was in the bunker but the one thing they did suspect was in the bunker was anthrax.
Training with anthrax is just a coincidence I’m sure.
Sounds more like a test to measure the public’s response to bio attack.
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