Safety experts slam lax safety practices at CDC labs

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recently had lab mishaps involving some of the world's most dangerous pathogens, does "inadequate" training, lacks leadership commitment toward safety and has a significant percentage of staff who are afraid to report accidents, according to the agency's own safety advisers.

"We are very concerned that the CDC is on the way to losing credibility," wrote the group of external biosafety experts, appointed by the agency as advisers in the wake of high-profile accidents with anthrax and bird flu last year. "The CDC must not see itself as 'special'. The internal controls and rules that the rest of the world works under also apply to CDC."

The CDC quietly posted the experts' report on its website this week. It is dated Jan. 13 – six months after CDC Director Tom Frieden testified before Congress that he'd taken significant steps to address safety issues. The Atlanta-based agency's high-security labs do wide-ranging public health experiments, including work with the Ebola virus to help combat the ongoing outbreaks in Africa, studies of deadly strains of influenza to help make better vaccines and examinations of anthrax to create better detection methods for bioterror agents.

"CDC concurs with these recommendations, has made progress towards implementing them, and will soon report on that progress," according to text posted with the report on the webpage.

"It's critical that we continue to solicit feedback on how we can improve our operations, especially functions as critical as lab safety," CDC's chief operating officer Sherri Berger, said Wednesday, noting that many actions are already underway to address the committee's recommendations.

In a statement to USA TODAY, the agency said that although the findings of the outside experts were presented in January, the work group "began its review of CDC's laboratories in August and did the bulk of its assessment at CDC in August and September. So the report reflects the observations of the workgroup made several months ago."

Still, on Dec. 22, the CDC experienced another serious lab incident, this one involving a mix-up with specimens of the deadly Ebola virus that resulted in the potential exposure of a lab worker who had to undergo 21 days of monitoring during the holidays. The worker was never sickened, and the agency's internal investigation determined there may have been no live virus in the specimens after all.

The Ebola incident came after an anthrax incident in June potentially exposed dozens of CDC employees to that bioterror agent and another incident in early 2014 that involved sending a biological specimen to another federal laboratory that had been unknowingly cross-contaminated with a lethal strain of avian influenza.

U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said the report confirms what his subcommittee, which held a hearing last July, suspected. "Our oversight work revealed an agency desperately in need of a rededication to safety and accountability," Murphy said. "Given the nature of its work with dangerous toxins and deadly pathogens, the CDC must be held to a much higher standard than other government entities."

U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, of Colorado, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, noted that CDC leadership assured the committee they were working to improve their safety culture. "They clearly have more work to do, and our oversight of this problem will continue," she said.

The CDC advisory committee's co-chairs — Joseph Kanabrocki, associate vice president for research safety at the University of Chicago, and Kenneth Berns, an emeritus professor from the University of Florida – could not immediately be reached.

Among the findings and recommendations in the report:

• Risk assessments of proposed research "are either not being done in a standardized manner or are not being done at all." The committee said the "benefits and risks of proposed experimental work should be documented before the work is undertaken."

• "Laboratory safety training is inadequate," and "quality is not consistent."

• "Leadership commitment toward safety has been inconsistent and insufficient at multiple levels," the report said. Interviews and surveys found that CDC employees don't understand the agency's response to accidents. "Disturbingly, the negative responses peak among those individuals who work at BSL3 and 4, especially among those holding a master's degree," the report said, referring to biosafety level 3 and biosafety level 4 labs which work with the most dangerous bacteria, viruses and toxins.

• A survey of CDC employees indicates "a significant percentage of CDC staff have concerns about experiencing negative repercussions, either personally or more generally to the Agency, as a result of reporting incidents."

• Some CDC labs may focus more on bioterrorism security issues than safety. One example: When the agency made mistakes with a dangerous strain of avian influenza last year, the committee found that staffers were more concerned about violations of security regulations, than failures of biosafety protections.

The report makes almost 20 recommendations for improvements, and the CDC said it is already acting to enhance biosafety training, clarify policies, standardize protocols and ensure they are followed. The agency is recruiting to fill a new position of associate director for Laboratory Science and Safety that will report to the CDC director. The agency's fiscal year 2016 budget request includes an increase of $20 million to improve lab safety and capacity, the CDC said.

For full coverage of lab safety and security issues at CDC and other research facilities, go to: biolabs.usatoday.com.