Thirty-four incident reports of bioterror pathogens being mishandled were not disclosed to congressional investigators who were seeking the information in 2014, according to officials at the CDC.

These reports include information on specimens that were in unapproved areas, which may have resulted in contamination. These incidents occurred from 2007 to 2011, mostly at the CDC’s Fort Collins, Colorado infectious disease laboratory, said Steve Monroe, the CDC’s top lab safety official, as USA Today reported.

Close

These viruses — such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus — are classified as “select agents” by the federal government because the viruses could potentially be used as bioweapons and cause severe economic harm, according to USA Today.

[lz_related_box id=”157904″]

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, (R-Mich.), the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s chairman expressed extreme disappointment after learning about the situation.

“And just when we thought the situation could not get any more distressing, it does,” Upton said. “We’re not talking one or two incidents, but 139 discoveries of select agents in unregistered locations.” Information about these discoveries was included in the information the committee recently received from the CDC.

Dr. Raymond A. Zilinskas is the director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in Monterey, California. He echoed Upton’s feelings.

“It’s absolutely amazing to me how sloppy the CDC and the Department of Defense have been on these things,” he told LifeZette.

Zilinskas noted labs are getting worse at managing specimens, as is evident from recent shakeups at government laboratories.

[lz_related_box id=”160784″]

“I think it’s become terrible,” he added.

Last month, USA Today revealed that some CDC labs associated with one scientist had their federal select agent permits secretly suspended from 2007 to 2010 for violations while experimenting with Japanese encephalitis virus. Following that report, the House Energy and Commerce Committee began questioning the accuracy of the CDC’s 2014 account of incidents.

The incidents uncovered by USA Today were not included in the required information sent to the committee.

Additional labs with similar incidents that have gone unreported include labs in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Anchorage.

A small number of the reports involved potential exposure incidents that occurred while lab workers were doing inventory at Fort Collins and either encountered a previously broken specimen vial or a vial became broken during the inventory process, Monroe said. The workers were wearing protective gear and no infections occurred, Monroe said, as reported by USA Today.