Military Accidentally Sends Live Anthrax to As Many As 9 States

US Chemical Warfare Response team
Photo: MAI/© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon confessed that a U.S. military facility in Utah had “inadvertently” sent live anthrax spores to a lab in Maryland. Labs in eight other states were quickly notified that they also might have spores that weren’t dead from the same batch. There are no suspected cases of infection at the labs, and a spokesperson said there was “no known risk to the general public.” The Utah facility was “working as part of a DoD effort to develop a field-based test to identify biological threats in the environment,” such as the live anthrax it accidentally shipped out. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention accidentally sent out live anthrax spores and a dangerous strain of bird flu

Military Accidentally Sends Live Anthrax to Labs