WASHINGTON — Workers searching government laboratories in the wake of the July discovery of smallpox have found six more improperly stored, dangerous pathogens — including ricin, the neurotoxin botulism and the bacteria that causes plague.
On Friday, officials at the National Institutes of Health said the search on its sprawling Bethesda campus had turned up five different misplaced pathogens in recent weeks. All of the microbes are considered so dangerous that the federal government requires them to be stored in special high secure facilities. Instead, these vials were in regular labs, often part of collections of samples that date back decades.
Simultaneously, the Food and Drug Administration said it had found vials of staphylococcus enterotoxin, a frequent cause of foodborne illness, at a lab within the agency’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition that was not registered to handle it.
The latest unearthing of improperly stored toxins came during an unprecedented sweep of government labs prompted by the discovery in early July of long-forgotten vials of the smallpox virus inside an FDA lab on the NIH campus in Bethesda. Investigators have been trying to piece together how the vials, dated from 1954, wound up in a shared storage space inside an FDA biologics lab.
Officials at both agencies said Friday that they promptly reported the additional pathogens that have been unearthed to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , and that no employees were ever in danger of infection.
“These things were stored in locations where they should not have been stored,” said Alfred Johnson, director of the NIH’s office of research services, which is coordinating the a “clean sweep” of the agency’s labs.
At the same time, he said, the NIH is a facility that routinely conducts research “on the most dangerous materials out there. All of these were found in containers that were intact, and there have been no exposures. It reminds us, just like my garage at home, that from time to time, we need to check.”
Three of the hazardous samples were found at the NIH Clinical Center’s Department of Medicine, which stores thousands of microbial samples from a historical collection that dates back to the 1950s, Johnson said. In that collection, employees found two vials of the bacteria that causes plague, which killed millions in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Employees also found two vials of a rare bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei, which causes Melioidosis, also called Whitmore’s disease, a disease common in tropical climates that can cause chest and joint pain, skin infections and fever. In addition, workers discovered three vials of the pathogen that causes tularemia, also known as rabbit fever, a rare but highly contagious and potentially fatal disease.
The NIH search also turned up a vial of ricin in a chemical lab where it was not supposed to be in use. The sample was in a historical collection dating from 1914. Ricin is extremely poisonous if inhaled, injected or ingested.
Finally, researchers found two vials of botulism toxin in a lab of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Johnson said. Researchers are allowed to have individual quantities below half a milligram. But the total contained in the two vials was over the allowable limit.
The NIH said the improperly stored pathogens it found were discovered between July 29 and Aug. 27. The FDA’s discovery came much earlier — July 15 — though the agency did not disclose the findings to employees or the public until Friday.
Agency officials said that while the FDA’s food safety research center in College Park, Maryland, does have labs registered to work with staphylococcus enterotoxin, samples of the pathogen were discovered in the freezer of a lab that had not been registered to handle the bacteria.
Stephen Ostroff, the FDA’s acting chief scientist and the official overseeing the agency-wide inventory, said in an email to employees Friday afternoon that while the vials were safely stored, they collectively contained 8 milligrams of staphylococcus enterotoxin — 3 milligrams more than the quantity needed to be considered a dangerous “select agent.”
In an interview with a Post reporter on Aug. 1, two weeks after the latest discovery there, FDA director Margaret Hamburg was asked whether the agency had found any additional misplaced pathogens during the ongoing sweep of its labs.
“I’m happy to report that in the cold room inventories across the agency, we have not found any other stocks of unexpected hazardous biological materials,” she said, adding with a laugh, “They probably found some old lunches.”
FDA officials said Friday that despite the discovery on July 15, which was quickly reported to the CDC, that Hamburg and Ostroff were not notified of the finding until Aug. 4.
In his email Friday, Ostroff told employees, “Importantly, as of now, there have been no other improperly stored hazardous materials identified in the FDA-wide inventory.”