The same facility that accidentally shipped live samples of the deadly pathogen was mixing powerful bomb-making ingredients with everyday kitchen tools, investigators found.
It came as a shock when the U.S. military came clean about one of the worst biodefense screw-ups on American soil in decades -- the release of live, lethal anthrax to more than 85 unsuspecting labs. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a complete surprise, given the anthrax’s source.
Dugway Proving Grounds -- a massive, 1,300 square mile Army research and testing facility in remote, northwestern Utah -- has had throughout its history a number of alarming safety lapses involving deadly chemicals, biological agents, and high explosives.
It’s not just that Dugway failed for more than a decade to follow standard procedures for killing the lethal anthrax bacteria -- a long-running blunder that led to the lab shipping around the globe live anthrax samples that were supposed to be dead. (A Pentagon review of that biosafety breach is due this week.)
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