Federal officials found more than just long-forgotten smallpox samples recently in a storage room on the National Institutes for Health campus in Bethesda, Md. The discovery included 12 boxes and 327 vials holding an array of pathogens, including the virus behind the tropical disease dengue and the bacteria that can cause spotted fever, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the lab in question.
“The fact that these materials were not discovered until now is unacceptable,” Karen Midthun, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), told reporters Wednesday. “We take this matter very seriously, and we’re working to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The disclosure came hours after Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified on Capitol Hill that researchers at the agency mishandled live anthrax and other deadly pathogens in a string of mishaps in recent years. “We missed a critical pattern,” he told lawmakers. “And the pattern is an insufficient culture of safety.”
Both the smallpox discovery and the previously undisclosed safety lapses at the CDC have sowed doubt about how the nation’s premier public health and research institutions are safeguarding some of the most lethal organisms on Earth.
The vials of smallpox, a scourge that was eradicated decades ago after killing hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone, remain the most disturbing find this month inside the third-floor cold storage room in Building 29A. Those samples were flown to the CDC in Atlanta, and at least two have shown growth in tissue cultures, meaning they are viable, or alive.
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