(Newswire.net — May 28, 2015) — One unnamed US official told Reuters that the United States military has been transporting live Anthrax that was mistakenly marked as ‘inactive’. The samples were transported in several occasions from March 2014 to April 2015, Reuters reported.
The most recent time, live Anthrax was shipped from a military base in Utah and traveled across the nine other states until it somehow found it’s way onto a flight to South Korea, Department of Defense confirmed, adding that there was no risk for the public.
Reportedly, the live Anthrax samples were shipped from Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland to federal, private and academic facilities.
According to Reuters, authorities have suggested that four people inside the US take preventative medicine, but it’s unclear if they were exposed to substance.
The one sample was accidentally directed to Osan Air Base in South Korea, the Pentagon stated. The sample, however, was destroyed and, so far, no one is believed to be at risk.
“We are investigating the inadvertent transfer of live anthrax from a DoD lab from Dugway Proving Ground,” a USArmy facility in Utah, Col. Warren said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is assisting the military, investigating the matter, the Pentagon representative said.
According to AP, Col. Warren said that the government now believes eight other shipments from across the US contained live specimens of Anthrax instead of the presumably inactive ones.
The samples in question were shipped to labs in Texas, Maryland, Wisconsin, Delaware, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, California and Virginia, AP reported.
Last year, the director of the CDC’s bioterror laboratory resigned after a scare raised concerns that dozens of government employees had potentially been exposed to anthrax at an Atlanta facility.
Antrax is an acute disease caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthraces. Until the 20th century, anthrax infections killed hundreds of thousands of animals and people worldwide each year.
As a result of over a century of animal vaccination programs, sterilization of raw animal waste materials, and anthrax eradication programs in most of the countries including the United States, Canada, Russia, Eastern Europe, Oceania, and parts of Africa and Asia. Anthrax infection is now relatively rare in domestic animals.