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Threat Assessment II: U.S. Laboratories Had Security Lapses in 1990s, Scientists Say In the early to mid-1990s, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md., lacked strict security measures to prevent against the theft of biological agents, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 22). “No one asked questions,” said former USAMRIID scientist Richard Crosland, who worked with botulinum toxin. “You could literally walk out with anything.” “It blew me away,” said another researcher who worked at USAMRIID until the early 1990s. “I could have lifted vials of anything, and they never would have been missed. There was nothing to stop me.” USAMRIID lacked strict inventory controls over the pathogens and toxins used by researchers, former facility scientists said. They added that the strict controls would be considered standard procedures at facilities that worked with less dangerous materials. “No one ever came in and asked, ‘Where’s that material you ordered?’ Never once did they ask you what you did with it,” Crosland said. “7-Eleven keeps better inventory than they did.” “I would work all by myself with some of the most dangerous organisms in the world,” said a former USAMRIID technician. “It wasn’t just a matter of security lapses — there was absolutely no security.” In a 1992 statement, the then-head of the facility’s pathology division told Army investigators that “shenanigans have been going on” at USAMRIID. Scientists at the facility had secretly been working on their own projects, technicians were asked to come in on weekends to assist in unauthorized projects and “quite a bit of stuff was unaccounted for,” said Lt. Col. Michael Langford in a transcribed interview. “It was obvious to me there was little or no organization of that group and little or no accountability of many things,” Langford was quoted as saying. Lapses Due to “Culture Change” USAMRIID officials said there is no evidence that any dangerous pathogens were taken from the facility or misused. They added that security has been improved at the facility since the mid-1990s and further still in the past four months since the anthrax attacks. The current security measures are similar to those adopted by the National Institutes of Health, said USAMRIID spokesman Charles Dasey. Security lapses in the early to mid-1990s resulted from a major shift in focus after the Gulf War, USAMRIID officials said. “There was a huge culture change,” Dasey said. “Before the war, the threat from weapons of mass destruction wasn’t as real as it became after the war. Suddenly the threat was very real.” One change at USAMRIID was a shift away from an “academic style of research” to one more concerned with the possibility of a biological weapons attack, Dasey said. “Some of the scientists at the time weren’t comfortable with that change,” he said. Lapses Found at Energy Department Laboratories Security lapses were also found at U.S. Energy Department laboratories that conducted research on pathogens with the potential to be used as biological weapons, according to the Post (see GSN, Dec. 18, 2001). At one Energy laboratory, scientists worked for years on anthrax without notifying security officials, according to an internal audit. Several facilities exchanged pathogen samples, including those of anthrax and plague, without notifying the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as legally required, according to a report by the department’s inspector general completed last year. The report also said another laboratory had provided potentially misleading information to the CDC about its qualifications to handle certain pathogens. Energy said it has enacted new security measures in the past year to protect workers and the public. New measures include requirements for all department laboratories to conform to CDC guidelines on handling pathogens, an Energy spokesman said. Biological security in the mid-1990s was not as high of a priority as it is today, said Tara O’Toole, Energy undersecretary for the environment, safety and health from 1993 to 1997. “It’s a measure of how fast things have changed,” said O’Toole, now head of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “It is unfair to impose January 2002 standards and sensibilities on 1999” (Joby Warrick, Washington Post, Feb. 19).
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