Equipment failures within a biolab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention date back to 2009, according to a report published Wednesday in USA TODAY. But at the time, some within the CDC tried to avoid reporting the problems to failure regulators, the newspaper reported.
USA TODAY obtained the lab records under a Freedom of Information Act, which took the CDC 3½ years to fulfill, the report says.
“The incident summary reads like a screenplay for a disaster movie,” Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University biosafety expert who reviewed the report, told USA TODAY.
“Overall, the incident shows that failures — even cascading, compounding, catastrophic failures of BSL-4 biocontainment labs occur,” said Ebright, who has testified before Congress about CDC safety issues. “And the attempted cover-up within the CDC makes it clear that the CDC cannot be relied upon to police its own, much less other institutions.
CDC officials say there was never any risk posed by the lab’s equipment failures, the newspaper reported.
The CDC’s lab operations have been under scrutiny since 2014 because of a series of high-profile safety incidents at the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta, involving anthrax, Ebola and a deadly strain of influenza, revealed a lax safety culture inside the world renowned agency.
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