Scary discovery: Lab workers find live anthrax shipped by U.S. military

Four U.S. lab workers and as many as 22 people at a South Korea military base may have been exposed to anthrax after the American military accidentally shipped out live samples of the bacteria, officials said. The four lab employees were undergoing medical treatment as a precaution. All of the samples had supposedly been irradiated last year at a military lab in Utah and were thought to be “dead.” But on Friday, a private firm in Maryland notified authorities that its sample was still active, setting off an urgent review of all material sent out to other labs, defense officials said.

There is no known risk to the general public, and there are no suspected or confirmed cases of anthrax infection in potentially exposed lab workers.

Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren

The anthrax was meant to be shipped in an inactive state as part of efforts to develop a field-based test to identify biological threats, the Pentagon said. The suspected live anthrax samples were sent to U.S. federal, private and academic facilities. In addition to the Army lab that received the active sample, and the private lab where it was discovered, the military also mistakenly sent samples from the original batch to labs in California, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Virginia.

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