- SAN FRANCISCO - At least
five workers developing an anthrax vaccine at a children's hospital research
lab in Oakland were exposed to the deadly bacterium because of a shipping
foul up, officials reported Thursday.
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- Officials with the Children's Hospital Oakland Research
Institute said none of the researchers have shown symptoms of infection,
but are being treated with antibiotics as a precaution.
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- Hospital spokeswoman Bev Mikalonis said the researchers
believed they were working with a dead version of the anthrax bacterium,
but were instead shipped live anthrax by the Frederick, Md. lab of the
Southern Research Institute, which is headquartered in Birmingham, Ala.
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- Mikalonis said other workers may have also been exposed
while the live anthrax was being handled and that federal, state and local
officials - including the FBI - are investigating.
-
- The hospital doesn't believe that anyone was infected
because researchers used proper procedures and precautions while handling
the anthrax shots. The Oakland lab itself is located about one mile from
the Children's Hospital and Mikalonis said exposure doesn't pose a threat
to the hospital and surrounding community.
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- The researchers are working with dead bacterium to develop
an anthrax vaccine that children can use. Anthrax attacks killed five people
and sickened 17 others in 2001 in the United States. No one has ever been
arrested for the killings, but the attacks spurred development of better
vaccines and treatments for anthrax than are currently available.
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- Mikalonis said the Oakland researchers received and stored
a shipment of what they thought to be dead anthrax from the Southern Research
Institute about three months ago.
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- Last week, the Oakland researchers began injecting anthrax
from the shipment in mice as part of an experiment. On Monday the mice
unexpectedly began to die. On Wednesday night, California state health
officials confirmed their worst fears: live anthrax was in the syringes.
Agents with FBI's bioterrorism unit removed the samples from the lab Wednesday.
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- Southern Research Institute's Thomas Voss, who is in
charge of homeland security and emerging infectious disease, said the nonprofit
company is investigating what happened. Voss said it's still unclear whether
the institute did ship live anthrax to Oakland.
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- "We aren't totally sure of the sequence of events,"
Voss said.
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- The Southern Research Institute was founded in 1942 and
has two highly secure "hot labs" that store some of the world's
most deadliest diseases. Labs and researchers from around the country that
need data about those nasty diseases but don't - or can't - handle them
contract with the Southern Research Institute to do that work.
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- Voss said the institute's hot labs in Frederick and Birmingham
handle just about every "select agent" listed with the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The institute is one of
350 entities registered to handle live anthrax with the CDC. It employs
600 people nationwide and has about $75 million in revenue a year, Voss
said.
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- Voss said that while the institute receives many shipments
of live diseases, it rarely ships them out.
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- "We receive agents on a routine basis," Voss
said. "But on our end, we ship very infrequently. I can't even recall
shipping live agents."
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- The mishap will surely be seized on by critics of the
government's effort to combat biological terrorism by paying for the construction
or expansion of 18 high-containment labs across the country.
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- Supporters of the building boom said the additional lab
space is needed to combat emerging global threats, but critics said such
expansion increases the likelihood of accidents like the one Oakland reported
Thursday.
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