UC slapped with $450,000 fine over'05 anthrax release

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Oct 6, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The University of California has been fined $450,000 for the release of anthrax in September 2005 from a shipped package that was improperly packed by workers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which until earlier this week was managed by the university.

The fine, which came to light Friday during a congressional hearing on the safety and security of biodefense research laboratories, was levied Sept. 24 by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Though the Livermore incident did not result in any human exposure or injuries, the fine is the largest of 11 issued by the department's HHS Office of the Inspector General since 2003. During that time, more than 100 accidents have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, both of which monitor parts of the biodefense research program.

The Livermore incident occurred when vials of anthrax were transported from Livermore Lab to laboratories in Florida and Virginia. When one package of 1,000 vials of anthrax was opened, two vials had become uncapped and a third cap was loose, according to lab spokeswoman Susan Houghton.

Houghton said no anthrax was released during shipping because there were multiple layers of protection.

"It's packaging within packaging within packaging," she said.

The lab took immediate action to correct the problem and voluntarily suspended research with anthrax and other deadly biological substances for seven months, Houghton said, after which time the CDC renewed the lab's registration to work with biological agents for three years.

"We're going to work to make sure this never happens again," she said.

A corporation run by UC and Bechtel Corp. and several other private companies took over management of the lab Monday.

The subcommittee hearing

of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was prompted by several recent laboratory accidents, some of which resulted in human exposure such as a bite by a bird-flu infected ferret at a lab in Rockville, Md., and a plague-infected monkey bite in Albuquerque, N.M.

Rapid growth in the number of biodefense laboratories researching deadly pathogens has overwhelmed the government's ability to monitor the program adequately, federal investigators told Congress on Thursday.

Officials said the expansion of the program over the last few years, coupled with a lack of training of lab workers and poor reporting of lab accidents,

posed a potential threat to national security and public health.

"There are too many (labs) at the moment for the level of oversight that's being provided," said Keith Rhodes, chief author of a preliminary report from the Government Accountability Office on biodefense and emerging diseases research. "It's stretched beyond the ability of the fragmented, decentralized oversight that there is now."

Rhodes also expressed concern that in a survey of 12 federal agencies, none of them could tabulate a total number of the high- security labs -- known as Bio-Safety Level 3 and 4 labs -- that do research on deadly biological agents such as Ebola, anthrax and the plague.

Staff writer Betsy Mason, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday contributed to this report.