Maryn McKenna

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CDC Lab Errors and Their Implications: Congressional Hearing Today

July 16, 2014 By Maryn Leave a Comment

TEM image of influenza A H7N9, CDC

TEM image of influenza A H7N9, CDC

Leadership of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will appear today before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, to answer questions about the lab accidents with flu and anthrax that the CDC disclosed in its press conference last week.

On deck: CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden; Dr. Joseph Henderson, Deputy Director of the CDC’s Office of Security and Emergency Preparedness; staff from the Government Accountability Office and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services of USDA; and academic experts.

Tuesday night, the witnesses’ written testimony was placed on the Committee’s webpage. Frieden’s says in part:

First, these incidents should never have happened, and the lack of adequate procedures and oversight that allowed them to happen was totally unacceptable. Although it does not appear that these incidents resulted in any illness, and there was no release of pathogens as a result of either event, this does not excuse what happened.

Second, we will take every step possible to prevent any future incident that could put our laboratory scientists, others in the CDC workforce and the broader community, or the public at risk… I am personally overseeing a series of reforms designed to address these specific incidents – but more broadly, recognizing that our challenge is larger than addressing these two specific incidents, I will oversee the careful and deliberate review of existing, and development of new safety practices at all levels of our Agency…

Third, we will explore the broader implications of these incidents and incorporate the lessons learned from them to proactively prevent future incidents at laboratories across the Nation that work with pathogens.

The two accidents, and especially the flu accident — in which a serious strain of avian flu was mistakenly sent to a poultry-research lab, instead of a mild one — have revived concerns about research currently being pursued, not at the CDC, that soups up flu strains to artificial combinations of transmissibility and virulence. The fear, which I’ve written about here and here, is that a lab accident could allow such manmade flu strains to escape.

In advance of the hearing, a group of scientists who have been critical of the lab-enhanced flu work (generally called “gain of function” or “dual use” research) have banded together as the Cambridge Working Group to put their concerns on the record. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: anthrax, CDC, congress, influenza

Terror and Bioterror: 9/11 to 10/4 (Part 4)

October 2, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This Tuesday, Oct. 4, marks the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the first deaths in the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks, the first successful, fatal bioterrorist attack in American history on American soil. The anthrax attacks were recognized in the midst of the grief and disquiet that swept the United States after the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks, and like those, they changed for good the US’s sense of its security and its role in the world.

The foot-soldiers of much of the government response to 9/11 and 10/4 were the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the rapid-reaction disease detectives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In recognition of the anniversaries of the two attacks, I’ve been running excerpts from my book Beating Back the Devil about the little-known, behind the scenes disaster response work performed by the disease-detective corps.

Beating Back the Devil was written in 2004. In 2008, the FBI acknowledged that for several years, it had incorrectly pursued a government scientist named Steven Hatfill as a “person of interest” in the letter attacks. That same year, another government scientist named Bruce Ivins committed suicide as the FBI was preparing to name him their chief suspect. But that did not bring the story to an end; as Wired‘s Noah Schachtman reported earlier this year, serious doubts remain about the FBI’s actions and Ivins’ role.

But in October 2001, all of that lay in the future. The CDC’s disease detectives were enmeshed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings, and turning their attention to mysterious illnesses in Florida, New York, and Washington, DC.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: 911, anthrax, CDC, EIS, Science Blogs, terrorism, World Trade Center

Terror and Bioterror: 9/11 to 10/4 (Part 3)

September 25, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Between Sept. 11 and Oct. 4, 2001, the United States was paralyzed by fear: First of terrorism, from the World Trade Center attacks, and then of bioterrorism, because so many government planners believed a biowarfare attack would follow a conventional one. They were right. In this ongoing excerpt from Beating Back the Devil, a history of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, a team of young disease detectives fans out across New York City in the wake of Sept. 11, hunting for any signals of a bioterror epidemic and struggling to separate what they see from common illnesses and panicked false alarms. While they search, a victim of bioterror does turn up — but far from New York City, at the other end of the East Coast.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: 911, anthrax, CDC, EIS, Science Blogs, terrorism, World Trade Center

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