CDC admits mishandling deadly flu, closes labs

Level One: Microbes aren't known to consistently cause disease in healthy adults and pose minimal potential hazard to workers. Example: a nonpathogenic strain of E. coli

Level Two: Microbes pose moderate hazards to workers and are typically indigenous and associated with diseases of varying severity. Requires additional safety equipment and practices. Example: Staphylococcus aureus

Level Three: Microbes can be indigenous or exotic, can cause serious or potentially lethal disease through respiratory transmission. Safety measures include medical surveillance of lab workers and restricted access at all times. Example: Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Level Four: Microbes are dangerous and exotic, posing a high risk of aerosol-transmitted infections. Infections are frequently fatal and without treatment or vaccines. Safety measures include showering upon exit and full body suits with their own air supply. Example: Ebola virus

The CDC has such operations in Atlanta; Ft. Collins, Colo.; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Anchorage, Alaska; Cincinnati, Ohio; near Pittsburgh, Pa.; Spokane, Wash.; and Morgantown, W. Va. Agency spokesman Benjamin Haynes said he could not provide a comprehensive list of labs because of security reasons.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shipped a deadly flu virus to a lab in Athens by mistake, the agency said on Friday — the second incident of mishandling dangerous germs at the CDC in the past two months. The Atlanta-based agency said it has responded to the scares by closing its flu and anthrax labs and suspending shipments of any infectious agents.

“These events revealed totally unacceptable behavior,” CDC Director Thomas 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.”

He said no one was exposed to the sample of avian flu, which had somehow contaminated a sample of a less virulent flu virus sent to a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in Athens.

Friday’s disclosures came days after the government revealed that 60-year-old vials of smallpox virus had been forgotten in a lab building at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. Frieden said Friday that two of the six vials contained live virus. All the samples are to be destroyed, and no infections have been reported in that incident, either.

In a separate episode last month, the agency mistakenly shipped live anthrax bacteria to three other labs. Dozens of CDC workers may have been exposed to the bacteria, which were supposed to have been killed before shipping. All were offered a vaccine and antibiotics, and the agency said it believed no one was in danger.

The incident in the flu lab is the most distressing, Frieden said. Workers didn’t notify top CDC officials, including Frieden, of the cross-contamination until six weeks after the fact.

The director told reporters there was no valid reason it took that long for the incident to be reported.

“The fact that something like this could happen in a such a superb laboratory is unsettling,” he said. “It tells me we need to look at the culture of safety in all of our laboratories.”

‘It had to have happened here’

The original flu sample, identified as H9N2, came from the National Influenza Center in Hong Kong, the agency said. Before it was sent to the Athens lab, however, the sample was contaminated with H5N1, the potentially lethal strain of avian flu that has killed 386 people since 2003.

“We know what they sent was not contaminated, so it had to have happened‎ here,” CDC press officer Benjamin N. Haynes said in an email to the AJC. “Those details should come out during the investigation.”

The agency occupies a sprawling campus on Clifton Road, the site of some of its most sensitive and high-security laboratories, near Emory University.

The agency also released a report that detailed three other incidents in the past decade in which mistakes or other problems caused potentially dangerous germs to be sent out. No lab worker or member of the public was sickened in any of the incidents, the CDC said.

The federal agency operates some of the world’s most advanced and most secure laboratories for the handling of deadly germs, and has enjoyed a reputation as a role model for that kind of work.

“I’m just astonished that this could have happened here,” Frieden said.

Internal and outside panels will investigate recent problems and review safety procedures for handling dangerous germs, the director said.

‘A nonstop series of bombshells’

The CDC shipment moratorium applies to specially built labs in Atlanta and Fort Collins, Colo., that deal with the most dangerous infectious germs. Work in the labs includes developing vaccines and medications and finding faster ways to diagnose infection.

Scientists doing the most controversial work with infectious agents — 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 designed.

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 CDC renewed calls for a moratorium by opponents of such “gain of function” research aimed at making viruses more dangerous, ostensibly to see what potential vaccines against them should contain.

“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.”

Frieden said “appropriate personnel action” will be taken against any employees who caused or failed to prevent the safety failures. No matter how terrifying these germs can be, “if you work with something day in and day out, (eventually) you can get a little careless,” he said.