This story reminds me of UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran. There seems to be a culture of arrogance and carelessness in elite institutions.
C.D.C. Closes Anthrax and Flu Labs After Accidents
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
New York Times
JULY 11, 2014
Monday, July 14, 2014
Arrogance and carelessness in elite institutions: C.D.C. Closes Anthrax and Flu Labs After Accidents
After
potentially serious back-to-back laboratory accidents, federal health
officials announced Friday that they had temporarily closed the flu and
anthrax laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
in Atlanta and halted shipments of all infectious agents from the
agency’s highest-security labs.
The
accidents, and the C.D.C.’s emphatic response to them, could have
important consequences for the many laboratories that store high-risk
agents and the few that, even more controversially, specialize in making
them more dangerous for research purposes.
If
the C.D.C. — which the agency’s director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, called
“the reference laboratory to the world” — had multiple accidents that
could, in theory, have killed both staff members and people outside,
there will undoubtedly be calls for stricter controls on other
university, military and private laboratories.
In one episode last month, at least 62 C.D.C. employees may have been exposed to
live anthrax bacteria after potentially infectious samples were sent to
laboratories unequipped to handle them. Employees not wearing
protective gear worked with bacteria that were supposed to have been
killed but may not have been. All were offered a vaccine and
antibiotics, and the agency said it believed no one was in danger.
In
a second accident, disclosed Friday, a C.D.C. lab accidentally
contaminated a relatively benign flu sample with a dangerous H5N1 bird
flu strain that has killed 386 people since 2003. Fortunately, a United
States Agriculture Department laboratory realized that the strain was
more dangerous than expected and alerted the C.D.C.
In addition to those mistakes, Dr. Frieden also announced Friday that two of six vials of smallpox recently found stored in a National Institutes of Health laboratory since 1954 contained live virus capable of infecting people.
All
the samples will be destroyed as soon as the genomes of the virus in
them can be sequenced. The N.I.H. will scour its freezers and storerooms
for other dangerous material, he said.
“These
events revealed totally unacceptable behavior,” Dr. Frieden said. “They
should never have happened. I’m upset, I’m angry, I’ve lost sleep over
this, and I’m working on it until the issue is resolved.”
The
anthrax and flu labs will remain closed until new procedures are
imposed, Dr. Frieden said. For the flu lab, that will be finished in
time for vaccine preparation for next winter’s flu season, he said.
Dr.
William Schaffner, the head of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt
University’s medical school, said he thought all American labs should
stop shipping all hazardous agents until they have reviewed their safety
procedures. Although there is no obvious way to force them to do that,
he said, the federal grants that most labs depend on “could be the
stick.”
Dr.
Frieden himself suggested that the accidents had implications for labs
beyond his agency, arguing that the world needs to reduce to absolute
minimums the number of labs handling dangerous agents, the number of
staff members involved and the number of agents circulating.
Scientists
doing the most controversial work — efforts to make pathogens more
lethal or more transmissible — say the research helps predict mutations
that might arise in nature so that vaccines can be created. But other
scientists feel that creating superstrains is unacceptably dangerous
because lab accidents are more common than is often acknowledged, as Dr.
Frieden’s announcement indicated.
The revelations at the C.D.C. renewed calls for a moratorium by opponents of such “gain of function” research.
“This
has been a nonstop series of bombshells, and this news about
contamination with H5N1 is just incredible,” said Peter Hale, founder of
the Foundation for Vaccine Research, which lobbies for more funding for
vaccines but opposes “gain of function” research. “You can have all the
safety procedures in the world, but you can’t provide for human error.”
At
the C.D.C. itself, Dr. Frieden said, staff members who knowingly failed
to follow procedures or who failed to report dangerous incidents will
be disciplined. A committee of experts will be convened to revise
procedures.
In
the flu-related incident, a C.D.C. lab accidentally contaminated a
sample of less-dangerous H9N2 bird flu, which it was preparing for
shipment to an Agriculture Department laboratory, with the H5N1 bird flu
strain.
Though
the contamination was discovered on May 23, Dr. Frieden said that he
was dismayed to discover that senior C.D.C. officials were not informed
until July 7, and that he was told only 48 hours ago.
Nonetheless,
he said, “we have a high degree of confidence that no one was exposed.”
The flu material was handled in high-biosafety-level labs in both
agencies, and the workers wore breathing apparatuses.
In theory, the flu-related accident could have been much worse than the anthrax one.
Anthrax
can kill those who inhale it, but is not normally transmitted between
humans, so an infected laboratory worker presumably could not have gone
home and passed it on. H5N1 bird flu has killed about 60 percent of
those known to have caught it, almost always after contact with poultry.
Although it does not easily jump from person to person, it is thought
to have done so several times.
The
anthrax episode took place on June 5 in the agency’s bioterrorism rapid
response lab as part of testing a new mass spectrometry method.
The
new C.D.C. report found several errors: A scientist used a dangerous
anthrax strain when a safer one would have sufficed, had not read
relevant studies and used an unapproved chemical killing method.
The
error was discovered by accident. The door to an autoclave that would
have sterilized samples taken for safety tests was stuck, so they were
left in an incubator for days longer than normal. Only then did a lab
technician notice that bacteria believed to be dead were growing.
Later
tests done at the C.D.C. and at a Michigan State Health Department lab
as part of the investigation confirmed that the chemical method would
have killed any live, growing anthrax in the samples that were sent out,
but might not have killed all spores, which are surrounded by a hard
shell and can also be lethal.
Although
anthrax terrifies laymen, “when you work with it day in and day out,
you can get a little careless,” Dr. Frieden said. “The culture of safety
needs to improve at some C.D.C. laboratories.”
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1 comment:
Carelessness of hospitals and now laboratories which contain dangerous viruses and bacteria whose outbreak can cost millions of lives. I don't get why the health care organizations don't impose the usages of good quality of equipments and safety guidelines in the laboratory! Thank you for the article. It is very informative.
Regards,
Charlie
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