U.S. Inspections Missed A&M Laboratory Mishaps

Annual inspections by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly failed to note numerous safety lapses at Texas A&M University’s biological defense program, the Dallas Morning News reported today (see GSN, Sept. 20).  The lapse ranged from improperly stored biological agents to cases of human exposure to deadly diseases (see GSN, Sept. 20).

CDC officials stopped the laboratory’s “select agent” research in response to revelations this summer that several laboratory workers had been exposed to infectious agents and one had been infected, but federal overseers have not explained why they missed signs of problems at the laboratory, the Morning News reported.

While visiting the A&M laboratory in 2004, 2005 and 2006, the inspectors noted sanitation and storage shortcomings, inadequate security measures, as well as poor training and record keeping.  They also reported cases of workers having unauthorized access to dangerous disease agents.

However, they did not find that a laboratory worker was infected with Brucella in 2006, even though she was at sick at home and reporting symptoms of the disease when the inspections took place.  The laboratory did not report the Brucella infection or several cases of workers being exposed to Q fever.

The reports have raised questions about how well the federal government conducts inspections at almost 350 other laboratories in the United States participating in biodefense research, according to the Morning News.

Next month, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee is expected to hold a hearing on the laboratory safety issues (see GSN, Aug. 13).

“The (federal) biodefense program has cropped up all over the country, and we have far more people handling biological weapons agents than at any other time,” said Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project in Austin, which finally uncovered the incidents in April 2007 by pushing for public records from the laboratory.  “What happened at Texas A&M makes me very suspicious of the quality level of any of the inspections.”

“What's pretty clear is that the public information act, not the inspections, is what has alerted the government to the accidents that have occurred,” Mr. Hammond said (Emily Ramshaw, Dallas Morning News, Sept. 25).

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