Also note that the Pentagon "discovered" these two months before House committees initiated inquiries about how well federal agencies were performing their control over inventories of germs, viruses, toxins and other life-destroying agents they are responsible for tracking.
It is very interesting that most of the report seems to me to spend more time on how other federal agencies performed poorly in tracking their inventories of pathogens.
GAO notes: "For the purpose of this report, we focused on inactivation as a process used in laboratories to render pathogens unable to cause disease but retain characteristics of interest for future use, such as for vaccine development.
"The total number of incidents involving incomplete inactivation that occurred from 2003 through 2015 is unknown for several reasons, including the inability to easily identify such incidents in existing databases. For those that are known, incidents occurred at federal, academic, and private high-containment laboratories and involved a range of inactivation methods and pathogens.
"The total number of incidents involving incomplete inactivation that occurred from 2003 through 2015 is unknown for three reasons: (1) the inability to easily identify incidents involving incomplete inactivation within incident databases, (2) the absence of reporting requirements for pathogens that are not select agents or recombinant pathogens, and (3) the absence of a clear, consistent definition of inactivation.
"The Select Agent Program is required to annually report to Congress only on the number and type (e.g., 'theft' or 'release') of all incidents that have occurred involving select agents. Select Agent Program officials initially told us that there were 10 incidents involving incomplete inactivation reported to the program from 2003 through 2015 (see table 2). NIH officials initially told us that they were unaware of any incidents involving incomplete inactivation involving recombinant pathogens that had occurred in that time frame.
"However, upon review of the Select Agent Program's database of reported incidents, we identified another 11 incidents that involved incomplete inactivation from 2003 through 2015, which we confirmed with the Select Agent Program, in addition to the original list of 10 they provided to us (see table 3)."
The current trash talk and action include placing missile systems in Poland (to protect Europe from the Iranians!) and in Romania. Romania? Why? Remember the Cuban missile crisis?
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