Quite the Mistake - Live Anthrax shipped by Army over 11 years to 194 labs in every state, 9 countries, 3 territories

This article is what I was treated to today on what to me is usually Recipe Wednesday, when I scour newspapers mostly for their Wednesday Food Sections. Today I found a most disconcerting Recipe For Disaster which has left me clammy and slack jawed for several hours. How is it possible for something like this to occur for over eleven years without detection by someone somewhere?

The Army mistakenly ships live anthrax to Hampton Roads , GAO report shows

Are we to take comfort in the word "mistakenly"? Like, oh, well at least they didn't do it on purpose ?

The Army has said samples of anthrax that were supposed to have been inactivated were sent to 194 federal, academic and commercial laboratories in every state, nine countries and three U.S. territories. There were a total of 575 shipments of live anthrax delivered to labs from 2004 through 2015, although the Army says no illnesses were reported.

Take a look at that distribution map. 11 years before one lab in Maryland noticed live spores? Where was the internal testing from the originating source? How about the internal testing at every single recipient? How is this even possible? No really, how is this possible?

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zett's picture

Holy God! I wonder if it goes even further back in time? I hope the part about no illnesses is true, of course, but I wonder how live anthrax goes hither and yon and no one gets sick? Maybe people got sick and reports of it were scrubbed...this is a CF of epic proportions.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

Anyone remember the anthrax attacks of 2001, and how everyone was "so sure" they could "only" have come from one place?

Yeah.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

Bollox Ref's picture

Late 2001 was a very odd time.

Actually, it's been odd ever since.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

on the Hill in a conference room in Hart SOB that had slight but possible exposure to anthrax through air ducts. Attendees were later offered free doses of Cipro.

Date: Oct. 17, 2001
(Ironic?) Title of this briefing: U.S. Biowarfare Defense: A Cost-Effective Strategy to Create Highly Efficacious Strategic Reserves of Therapeutics and Vaccines

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

We may have even met in passing; I was doing a lot of lobbying in the early halcyon days of Obama's presidency.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

contractor. That work took me all over DC, various agencies, and the Hill. For that particular Capitol Hill briefing, I worked with the outfit that summarized the proceedings.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

The city had become a visibly armed camp (bad enough hearing choppers in the wee hours delivering wounded from our Iraq misadventures to Walter Reed under cover of darkness). Nearest Metro stop had armed guards. Walls were going up around fed facilities. Unmarked police cars multiplied by the day. Flyovers increased. A mood of fear and intolerance for dissent pervaded. Didn't want child still at home growing up thinking that was normal. Moved far from the belly of the beast to a verdant rural valley.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Good choice. I made a similar one last year.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

to leave for family health issues related to the extreme climate. Now in the Willamette Valley and content here. Many politically compatible folks.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

I lived here as a teenager. It's still a good place to live. But you've found a better one--Oregon was next on our list. It's just that it was very far away from everybody we knew, a place none of us had ever been.

We may, if money and circumstances allow, eventually get a place in OR, because their right-to-death laws are very helpful for us, as are their medical marijuana laws (I know, what a weird reason to move somewhere, right?)

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

OR was the #1 relocation destination in the US last year, driven heavily, but not exclusively, by Portland. Retirees from colder climates are flowing in; a lot of movement north from parched CA as well. For us, the idea of a cross-country move turned out to be harder than the actuality.

Family, friends, and familiarity also are good reasons to stay or move. Best wishes with wherever life takes you. Must say that I kinda wish we'd made it to OR sooner.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

I had to hand-copy this one part from some text below a picture from the OP's link, but I think it's accurate:

http://pilotonline.com/news/military/local/the-army-mistakenly-shipped-l...

...At a press briefing Thursday, July 23, 2015 Pentagon officials said half the lots of anthrax produced at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah contained live anthrax after attempts to kill the bacteria failed.

In other words, they apparently have nothing that can reliably kill those live batches, presumably including those sent out and labelled as 'inactivated'.

Also, from the main article:

... The GAO report that contains the map showing the anthrax deliveries focused on other incidents where various pathogens weren’t inactivated before shipment. The report found 21 instances – 11 more than labs previously reported – between 2003 and 2015. The report also said the actual number could be higher because there’s no standardized way for labs to report a problem or a way to easily access databases.

So unkillable and deadly pathogens are sent all over America by the Army sworn to defend it over at least an eleven or twelve-year period? Why the heck are these even around for people to play with? I'll bet it's less searching for treatments than searching for appalling biological weapons to loose upon the world in war-crimes, considering what's already been and being done.

Corporate interests/defenders always accuse others of what they do themselves...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Late Again's picture

how they hounded that poor scientist (Bruce Edwards Ivins at Fort Detrick in Maryland) until he finally killed himself.

Glenn Greenwald covered it quite extensively and really took up that poor man's cause.

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"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." - Mark Twain

Sandino's picture

they will be able to plausibly claim not to know exactly where it came from. How convenient.

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riverlover's picture

and probably easy to ship: spores need growth medium to come to life, I can't recall the query lines from shipping biological materials. I was usually shipping DNA versions on a plasmid to grow in lab bacteria, but that was for one of the two pootie retroviruses. The one I worked with, an FIV variant, was most similar to HIV. I shall be visited tomorrow, never did this while in the lab, but I could have dripped the DNA version into an envelope with directions to receiver on where and what bacterial strains would grow it. So easy. There are many humans with ethics out there. Nice people.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

The relevant part's at 1:55

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1x-fMPyuAM]

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Anthrax itself not so much. Anthrax is pretty much everywhere, and with the condition of our feedlot industries I'm amazed there haven't been tons of outbreaks. Robin Cook even wrote a medical thriller on how easy it'd be to weaponize and disseminate anthrax.
What scares me more is some of the super plagues (sounds tinfoil hatty, but y'know they're doin' it) they're creating. Nothing scares me more than a truck loaded with Captain Trips gets t-boned by a semi running a red light.

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There is no such thing as TMI. It can always be held in reserve for extortion.

Shockwave's picture

The Cold War's Missing Atom Bombs

In a 1968 plane crash, the US military lost an atom bomb in Greenland's Arctic ice. But this was no isolated case. Up to 50 nuclear warheads are believed to have gone missing during the Cold War, and not all of them are in unpopulated areas

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The political revolution continues

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Interesting timing for letting the proles know.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

mimi's picture

on Joe's Evening Blues yesterday, I don't believe in much anymore and might just stop reading. Anyhow, we die with or without Anthrax and with or without nukes. So, why bother?

Meet Guy Sims Fitch, a Fake Writer Invented by the US Government

Guy Sims Fitch had a lot to say about the world economy in the 1950s and 60s. He wrote articles in newspapers around the globe as an authoritative voice on economic issues during the Cold War. Fitch was a big believer in private American investment and advocated for it as a liberating force internationally. But no matter what you thought of Guy Sims Fitch’s ideas, he had one big problem. He didn’t exist.

Guy Sims Fitch was created by the United States Information Agency (USIA), America’s official news distribution service for the rest of the world. Today, people find the term “propaganda” to be incredibly loaded and even negative. But employees of the USIA used the term freely and proudly in the 1950s and 60s, believing that they were fighting a noble and just cause against the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism. And Guy Sims Fitch was just one tool in the diverse toolbox of the USIA propaganda machine.

“I don’t mind being called a propagandist, so long as that propaganda is based on the truth,” said Edward R. Murrow in 1962. Murrow took a job as head of the USIA after a long and celebrated career as a journalist, and did quite a few things during his tenure that would make modern journalists who romanticize “the good old days” blush.

But even when USIA peddled its own version of the truth, the propaganda agency wasn’t always using the most, let’s say, truthful of methods. Their use of Guy Sims Fitch—a fake person whose opinions would be printed in countries like Brazil, Germany, and Australia, among others—served the cause of America’s version of the truth against Communism during the Cold War, even if Fitch’s very existence was a lie.

And aren't we back in cold war days? Or may be in "winless war days" of
Killing People, Breaking Things, and America’s Winless Wars - Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, September 28, 2016

Anthrax? That's just a footnote.

Ah, what happened to Scott Ritter?
AT FORUM HELD IN BALTIMORE ON AUG. 22 (me:that was in 2002) - Scott Ritter, former Marine and UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq, Makes Case Against War

During his time on the UN inspection team, Ritter and his colleagues demanded that Iraqi scientists and military personnel account for the “tons of growth media” they had once had in order to make anthrax and other such weapons. “They could not document how much anthrax they produced, but they were producing liquid bulk anthrax, and that only lasts three years. The same is true of other nerve agents. Their shelf life is five years.”

Ritter wants to know what the White House knows since December 1998, when the UNSCOM weapons inspectors left Iraq. “They would have had to rebuild the factories,” he pointed out, “and that would be imminently detectable by other nations. I guarantee you the Israelis aren’t sleeping on the issue of Iraq.”

He continued, “It’s not sound policy to go to war against Iraq. Some say ‘They might have secret information,’ but our Constitution says Congress is obligated to be apprised of this information. The Select Intelligence Committee has not been provided this information. [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair is waiting for the US to make the case. All we have is rumors, speculation, innuendo.

“So if there is no case, are we going to war for national security reasons, or for political reasons? We don’t go to war for political ambition. Before going to war,” he concluded his address, “we should take every step possible to prevent it.”

heh...
PBS Frontline Interview with Scott Ritter:

The UN Resolution 687 created an organization that hadn't ever existed before. The Security Council said, 'you have an assignment with the support of the world behind you: dismantle these weapons of mass destruction.' Right away, what do you run into?

heh, heh
The Meeting That Never Was: One UN Weapons Inspector’s Effort to Educate Hillary Before Her Iraq Vote - 02/29/2016 04:37 pm ET
Oh well.

heh,heh,heh
and he got into an Assange-like mess over sexual misconduct with minors etc. Sounds familiar, what else is new?

Edward Snowden, My Book with Scott Ritter, and the Art of Crushing the Messenger to Crush the Message
You really think I should read all that stuff?

I go by the "Less is More" motto. I think the truth news are always short. Smile

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Ed Murrow blush, too.

I'd take him back in a hot second over what we've got now. (Though I'm glad to know about Guy Fitch.)

People on the left tend to think that deflating notions of the "good old days" is automatically a progressive, maybe even a revolutionary, thing to do. But I'd be careful, especially right now, with people who deflate notions of the "good old days;" they may be trying to enforce a notion of political and economic inevitability. One of the main ways they do that is to wipe out historical difference--it's always been this way, this is just how the world is is a very useful statement to them, because then no pesky dissenters will imagine that change is possible (if it's never been any different before, what are the chances it will ever be any different in the future?) They buttress the idea that there never was anything good to look back to by revealing what was bad, and saying, triumphantly, See? Your heroes are a lie. No one with any ethics ever had power. This is just the way things are. In fact, ethics themselves are a pretty fantasy conjured up by people like you. I'm in favor of being honest about heroes, and their flaws, but not at all OK with the leap to See? Things have always sucked. Nothing exists but the suck. My way of trying to be truthful and not give in to their totalizing BS, which is, itself, propaganda of the highest order, is to attend to historical difference. Did Ed Murrow serve some interests which were wrong? Yes. Does his life-work, overall, tend toward the good? Yes. Most importantly, was his kind of journalism something that absolutely could not exist today, and is that a loss? Yes, and yes.

It's way easier to imagine a way out of Babylon if you think someplace else may have existed in the past, as the Rastafarians have figured out. (And no, they're not perfect either: terrible ideas about women.)

As for journalism, Murrow and Cronkite and the industry generally of course committed some quintessentially American sins during the "golden age of capitalism," but I remember what it was like living then, and what the press was like. For one thing, there was a press that had independent power coming from many different fiefdoms. Corporate power over the press existed, and Ed Murrow was eventually benched because of it, but it didn't have near-totalitarian control, as it does now. Bullshit Cold War gestures or not, if I were given the chance to have them back, I'd be dancing in the street.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Phoebe Loosinhouse's picture

What a crazily bizarre name to pick for the alias. Very interesting little historical snippet. Yes, it is hard to live in our Post Reality world.

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" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "

Lenzabi's picture

I almost mistakenly became part of a cloud of Fallout when one of our sergeants mistakenly woke one of our nukes up. took three tries and all night to put that baby back to sleep.

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So long, and thanks for all the fish