Experts in bio-safety have heavily criticised the lapse and called for improved precautions. The Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday that it sent live anthrax to a laboratory in Britain, among a growing number of locations, where the United States military mistakenly delivered the possibly fatal microorganisms.
The samples were shipped from Dugway army base which tests chemical weapons in a remote area of the Utah desert. The last estimate from the US Department of Defense on June 3, placed samples sent to 51 facilities in 17 states. Nobody has been taken ill but 31 people are receiving treatment as a precaution.
DoD Colonel Steve Warren about the latest results said that another batch was tested positive and that lot had sent samples to the United Kingdom and Massachusetts.
The one in Utah is the only one known to have sent samples that proved to have live bacterial spores. It has been sought by terrorists as it can be put into food and is hard to detect.
South Korea, Australia and Canada have already been named as recipients of questionable anthrax samples, along with 19 states and the District of Columbia.
The Pentagon is investigating and Senator Bill Nelson has called the error a ‘serious breach of trust’. The deadly spores are supposed to be made harmless before being shipped out for research.
Anthrax entered the US national consciousness in 2001, when shortly after the 9/11 attacks, letters containing powdered anthrax arrived at news organisations and the offices of US senators.
A similar breach was revealed in 2014 at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, when up to 70 staff were thought to have been accidentally exposed to the live toxin because the lab failed to use an approved sterilisation technique.
