WASHINGTON – The cold storage room where vials of smallpox were discovered in cardboard boxes in the summer at the National Institutes of Health had been previously inspected four times by NIH safety personnel, according to documents provided to a House panel investigating the incident.
During two safety surveys in October 2011, personnel inspecting labs and the common cold storage room noted the presence of cardboard storage, which was prohibited. One inspector wrote an additional comment: “Please remove all cardboard from the cold room.”
Inspection reports from 2012 and 2013, however, indicate no cardboard in the storage room, raising questions about what happened, lawmakers said.
Government officials have said the long-forgotten smallpox samples dating to the 1950s were among hundreds of vials of pathogens that were discovered in that cold storage room July 1, 2014. Officials said the vials, stored in cardboard boxes, had been overlooked for decades. They were found when personnel for the Food and Drug Administration, which oversaw the labs in Building 29A, were cleaning out the building to prepare for a move to FDA’s main campus in White Oak, Maryland.
Two of six vials of smallpox were found to have live virus and were later destroyed.
In a letter Tuesday, Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., who chairs its oversight subcommittee, said the inspection reports raise new questions and requested that the Government Accountability Office expand its review of the handling of biological agents and toxins by federal laboratories.
Among the questions: if the boxes had been there for decades, why weren’t the smallpox vials discovered earlier? And if later inspections found no cardboard in the cold storage room, did the inspectors miss seeing those boxes, or ignore them, or had the boxes been temporarily moved?
“We believe the information and evidence discovered from the investigation provides a basis to believe that there were additional lapses and concerns involved with the retention of smallpox samples than just the failure to account for undiscovered, and presumably abandoned, materials,” the lawmakers wrote.
A spokeswoman for the NIH was unable to provide a comment.
The smallpox discovery, along with other incidents involving the mishandling of pathogens at government labs, prompted a months-long sweep of federal laboratories last year involving nearly a dozen federal agencies, 4,000 lab facilities from Arkansas to Alaska, and more than 40 million biological samples.
Officials disclosed that they had found improperly stored substances, including ricin, the bacterium that cause plague, the bacterium that causes botulism, and vials of virulent bird flu. Some samples were destroyed. Some others were transferred to labs authorized to house them. Federal officials have said the incidents have prompted a move toward better accounting and safety protocols throughout government labs.
bc-smallpox
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
