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| Politics
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| US Health Chief Faces Congress Over |
| US Health Chief Faces Congress Over Flu, Anthrax Mixups
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 16-July-2014
13:3:16 PM |
| The chief of the US government's top public health agency is to testify in Congress on Wednesday over a series of dangerous mixups in the handling of influenza and anthrax.
Tom Frieden, who leads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is expected to face tough questions from the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations at the hearing, beginning at 10 am (1400 GMT).
Last week, the CDC admitted to five incidents over the past decade two of them in recent months in which workers shipped anthrax, flu, botulism and a bacteria known as brucella to other labs without following proper de-activation and safety procedures.
No one was believed to have been hurt by the mishaps, but they exposed a major lapse of protocol within the CDC, which is viewed globally as a leading scientific and health agency.
Frieden told reporters on Friday he was astonished and angry about the discoveries, which included the mistaken contamination of a mild flu strain with a dangerous H5N1 bird flu that was shipped to a US Department of Agriculture poultry lab. The incident happened six weeks before it was made known to CDC leadership, he said.
Other problems included the potential exposure of dozens of workers at the CDC's Atlanta headquarters to anthrax in early June, when samples were not properly handled and deactivated before shipment.
The CDC issued a report Friday that detailed three other lab mistakes in 2006 involving live anthrax and botulism, and in 2009 involving brucella, a strain of bacteria that can cause the infectious disease Brucellosis.
The discovery earlier this month of six forgotten vials of smallpox at a separate US government lab at the National Institutes of Health also raised alarm over the potential for the release of dangerous biological agents that could be used as weapons of terror.
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