![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/635883028819779009-dugway-anthrax-spore-handoutjpg.jpg\")
An anthrax spore an under electron microscope. Photographed at the Life Sciences Test Division of the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: U.S. Army<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dugway’s failures to fully kill anthrax specimens with radiation went undetected for more than a decade by military officials and federal lab inspectors from\u00a0the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was only discovered last May, when a private biotech firm that received some of Dugway’s purportedly killed anthrax specimens did their own tests and found the spores could still grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dugway’s authority to work with any potential bioterror pathogens remains suspended by the CDC. And in an interview with USA Today, Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr said Dugway will no longer be allowed to produce pathogen specimens for shipment to other facilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “They will make what they need for their own internal testing purposes,” Spoehr said, “but they will not be an exporter of biological products for the greater world or anybody else other than for Dugway’s internal use.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Army’s investigation has found that systemic issues contributed to Dugway’s live anthrax shipments, including gaps in scientific knowledge, poor lab practices and a “culture of complacency.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spoehr said all of the Pentagon’s biodefense labs remain under a self-imposed research moratorium while a new, unified lab oversight structure is put in place and protocols for working safely with pathogens are standardized and undergo scientific review. The process, especially creating verified kill methods for anthrax specimens \u2014 plus reliable tests to verify the spores are dead \u2014 could take another year, Army officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Restarting the biodefense research is critical in developing a wide range of tests and equipment to protect against deadly pathogens, such as those that cause Ebola, plague, botulism and anthrax, said Maj. Gen. Brian Lein, commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. “We have to do this to protect our troops going into harm’s way,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anthrax spores\u00a0can be potentially fatal if inhaled. More than 30 people who had contact with the Dugway specimens were put on antibiotics as a precaution after the live specimens started being discovered last May.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The military’s accountability review was launched last summer to determine if\u00a0there were any failures of leadership at the Dugway Proving Ground. An initial Pentagon investigation last year found Dugway’s lab records showed a 20% failure rate when it used radiation to kill anthrax specimens and indications that officials at the facility should have known there was a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n USA Today reported last year that Dugway had previously faced\u00a0a federal enforcement action in 2007 for improperly shipping live anthrax that was put through a different kill process that treated spores with chlorine dioxide. Records obtained under the\u00a0Freedom of Information Act\u00a0showed what experts said were egregious and cavalier failures by a Dugway lab worker. In testing a batch of anthrax to confirm it had been thoroughly killed, the worker\u00a0saw that some was still alive and able to grow in a test tube,\u00a0but\u00a0simply threw out that tube\u00a0and issued “death certificates” for the rest of the batch. A lab that received the specimens found that some of the anthrax bacteria it received also was still alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The new accountability review highlights this\u00a0mistaken shipment of live anthrax, which the report said went to the Lawrence Livermore\u00a0National Laboratories, as one of several red flags that should have triggered wider safety reviews and action years ago by Dugway’s\u00a0own leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite federal lab regulators concluding by 2009 that the live anthrax shipments to Livermore were a serious violation that would have merited a $500,000 fine if Dugway were not a government entity, the report says Dugway’s commander failed to follow up adequately. The report indicates Dugway staff disputed some aspects of lab inspectors’ findings and that King, as their commander, “had a duty to direct a comprehensive investigation” to resolve the dispute, but didn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The report also faults King with missing another opportunity to assess the effectiveness of procedures and staff at Dugway after receiving a report in early 2011 warning of a “relaxed attitude” in a critical chemical laboratory at the facility following an incident with VX nerve agent.\u00a0The report notes that King and other Dugway leadership took appropriate action in issuing reprimands and removing personnel within the chemical test facility, but didn’t consider that such negligence could extend to other operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition, the report says King knew about erroneous shipments of Botulinum neurotoxin A, which\u00a0had caused Dugway to fail a 2011 inspection by the Department of the Army\u00a0Inspector General. “Instead of considering all of these events as indicators of potential deep-rooted and widespread problems at (Dugway), he attempted to minimize the impact of the events,” the report said. King sent an email to his superiors downplaying the seriousness of the neurotoxin shipping errors, the report said, despite CDC lab regulators and enforcement officials maintaining that the issue “was always considered serious” and carried a potential $1.5 million fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since 2007, Dugway leadership and management “repeatedly displayed a tendency to question the validity of substantiated claims \u2026 and downplayed the seriousness of incidents and mishaps occurring within the Life Sciences Test Facility,” the report said. Leadership also failed to comprehensively investigate incidents or take disciplinary action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The “complacent environment” persisted, the report said, even after federal lab regulators repeatedly identified serious violations in how Dugway handled potential bioterror pathogens and authorized heavy fines, which ultimately were not imposed because Dugway’s is a government entity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The report also slaps Dugway personnel for “multiple” incidents of sloppy lab practices after reviewing 90 days of videotape of workers in highly-secure facilities. In one incident in late May, after the anthrax scandal broke, a technician is shown dropping a petri dish to the floor. Instead of alerting the Dugway safety office and reporting the incident to the CDC and Army officials, the woman picks up the sample and puts it in a cabinet to continue working on it. She is also seen touching her face under her air-purification mask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A brigadier general who led an Army biodefense lab in Utah is\u00a0among a dozen individuals facing potential disciplinary actions for egregious failures that contributed to the facility mistakenly shipping live anthrax to other labs for more than a decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":53391,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":70,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[12,70],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2799,568],"class_list":["post-37931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-your-army"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"DFGWVC3A4NBQLPYJYOEELJXXSI","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-army\/2016\/01\/15\/egregious-safety-failures-at-army-lab-led-to-anthrax-mistakes\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n