-Caveat Lector- http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011221/us/anthrax_army_lab_1.html
WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Friday December 21 6:31 PM ET Army Lab Said to Be Lax in Controls By DAVID DISHNEAU, Associated Press Writer FREDERICK, Md. (AP) - An Army laboratory that works with the strain of anthrax mailed to two senators was lax in accounting for deadly microbes during much of the 1990s, according to some former scientists at the post. Supervisors did not often check whether researchers were keeping track of lab materials as required, one scientist said. When they did, some researchers gave them photocopies of old reports, said Richard Crosland, who was laid off in 1997 from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. Others said that while it would have been nearly impossible for an unauthorized person to enter a restricted area, nothing would have prevented workers from removing deadly germs from the labs. ``As far as carrying anything out, microorganisms are small,'' said Luann Battersby, a biologist who left USAMRIID voluntarily in 1998 after eight years. ``The problem would be getting in, not getting out.'' Fort Detrick spokesman Charles Dasey declined to comment on the allegations of lax security. Regarding the possibility of someone stealing anthrax from the lab, he said: ``Other people are saying it could be done. I don't expect it has been done.'' Since the anthrax mailings, which focused attention on USAMRIID as a possible source of the bacteria, Dasey said inventory control has been re-emphasized. He said security staff conducts random exit searches and has video cameras at important laboratory areas - measures that Battersby said did not exist when she worked there. The strain of anthrax found in letters mailed to Sens. Thomas A. Daschle and Patrick J. Leahy is called Ames, after the city in Iowa where researchers first isolated it. Scientists at Detrick obtained a sample from the Agriculture Department in the early 1980s for vaccine testing and gave samples to at least five other labs. Dasey said the lab works only with Ames in cultured or liquid forms, and not in the dry powdered form used in the attacks. The Army said it has accounted for all the Ames anthrax that USAMRIID produced. Yet the scientists, none of whom worked with anthrax, said it would have been easy to walk out with a few cells in a petri dish or smeared on their clothing that could then be grown and processed. ``No matter what you do, there is not any way you can prevent a determined, skillful microbiologist from stealing traces of a microbial culture that he is working with, because it takes so few microbes to start a culture,'' said Mark Wheelis, a University of California microbiologist who serves on a biological weapons committee of the Federation of American Scientists. ``Bioterrorism wasn't a major issue until a few years ago,'' he said. ``Nobody was thinking that one of these respected, trusted scientists might actually steal one of the cultures with malevolent intent.'' Crosland, 55, who is suing the Army for age discrimination stemming from his 1997 layoff, said the Army's disinterest in tracking the botulinum toxin he worked with was typical of what he observed during more than a decade at the lab. ``There was never an audit in the 11 years I was there as to what was in my laboratory and what was supposed to be there,'' Crosland said. ``They never tried to balance what was brought into the institution against what was actually in the institution.'' *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! 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