Army Suspends Most Ft. Detrick Research Pending Bio-Materials Inventory - WP

The U.S. Army's Frederick-based laboratory for studying some of the world's deadliest diseases has suspended most research activities as it tries to find errors in an inventory of its biological materials, a spokeswoman for the institute said yesterday.

Col. John P. Skvorak, the head of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, ordered most lab work to stop last Friday, according to an order first obtained and posted on the ScienceInsider blog. He said the order was required to meet the Army and Defense Department's standards for keeping track of "biological select agents and toxins," known as BSAT, such as anthrax bacteria and the Ebola virus.

The lab has been under heavy pressure to tighten security since the 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17 others. FBI investigators think the anthrax strain used in the attacks originated at the Army lab, and its prime suspect in the investigation, Bruce E. Ivins, researched anthrax there. Ivins committed suicide last year.

The order to stop most work came after a spot check last month found 20 samples of Venezuelan equine encephalitis in a box of vials instead of the 16 that had been listed in the institute's database, according to Caree Vander Linden, the spokeswoman for the institute. The lab has made inventory mistakes before, "probably due to accounting errors, transcription errors, or BSAT that had not been reassigned when an employee left the Institute," Skvorak wrote in the memo. "I believe that the probability that there are additional vials of BSAT not captured in our . . . database is high."

EDIT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/09/AR2009020903511.html

Why do they have, what, guys on restriction, or something, doing the inventories? Jesus.