Yet another byzantine (and potentially deadly) Defense Department SNAFUed program. In short, they’re working with and researching some of the most human-lethal germs there are, yet have no complete records of what they have or where some it may be.

The U.S. Army has suspended research with deadly agents and toxins at the military’s top germ warfare lab….

The suspension, announced internally last week at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), was attributed to concerns about whether the facility had an accurate inventory of all the deadly “select agents” in its freezers and refrigerators. Select agents are the most dangerous and tightly regulated biological substances used in research, including anthrax, Yersinia pestis (plague) and the Ebola and Marburg viruses.

[snip]

…many WMD experts are worried that the $20 billion the federal government has spent on bio-defense research in the past seven years might actually have put the nation at even greater risk of a bioterrorism attack because the spending has spawned a proliferation of labs and scientists working with “select agents.”

John P. Skvorak, the commanding officer at USAMRIID, notified researchers in an internal memo that the lab was unable to meet Defense Department requirements that all biological select agents and toxins (BSAT) used in the facility be tracked and logged in a database.

Over the past four decades, as researchers have come and gone and programs have been started and completed, select agents no longer in use have accumulated in corners of the facility, according to one official. Much of it has become forgotten, she added. [The unspoken corollary being that there is virtually no way to document, track or identify what may have been removed from the facility proper. — voxd]

“I believe that the probability that there are additional vials of BSAT not captured in our database is high,” Skvorak wrote in the memo, which was first reported Monday by Science magazine.

He added: “We must take immediate steps to meet the Army and (Defense Department) definition of 100% accountability. Therefore, we will stand down until we have inventoried all freezers and refrigerators.” Source