Happy Saturday :)
Lethal bird flu cocktail sent out of lab accidentally, went unreported – CDC
A scientist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declined to tell superiors that a worker had mixed a lethal strain of bird flu with a more benign one, even though that mixed strain was shipped out to another laboratory.
According an internal investigation into the matter, the dangerous bird flu cocktail was then administered to chickens as part of a US Department of Agriculture (USDA), in which all of the chickens ended up dying. As a result, USDA officials took another look at the bird flu samples in May and notified the CDC that a deadly strain of the virus was detected inside.
No people fell ill due to the bird flu strain, the Associated Press reported, but it apparently remained in circulation for months – it was originally concocted in January – before scientists picked up on what was wrong.
This revelation comes in the wake of previous reports about lax safety at CDC laboratories. As RT reported in June, about 84 scientists were potentially exposed to anthrax after employees failed to properly sterilize the deadly bacteria. Although no one became sick and no reports of exposure have been filed, the eye-opening incident sparked an investigation that revealed multiple failures in safety protocol.
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link to rt.com]
“These events revealed totally unacceptable behavior,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said at the time. “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.”
Both the flu lab and the anthrax lab have been closed, and the anthrax lab director has since resigned.
Another investigation, meanwhile, found that dangerous microbes and “unidentified materials” were transported between labs in plastic Ziploc bags – containers which fail to meet the CDC’s “durability” requirement. In some cases, anthrax samples were found to be missing and had to be tracked down, while others were placed in unlocked labs not authorized to store the deadly bacteria.
United States
that would be terrible and