Alison Young

USA TODAY

Federal lab regulators unveiled a new website Friday to publicly track their progress improving oversight of safety and security at facilities working with bioterror pathogens such as anthrax and Ebola.

The website shows numerous reforms “in progress,” including improved inspections and better biosafety guidance for lab operators.

Officials at laboratory associations hailed the move as an example of improved transparency by lab regulators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the wake of a USA TODAY NETWORK investigation last year that uncovered serious incidents nationwide and revealed how pervasive secrecy obscures failures by labs and regulators.

But some community watchdogs said the CDC’s new online report card shows little action on the type of transparency the public needs the most: Details about violations and incidents at individual labs. Plans are moving forward, the site shows, to release anonymous, aggregate data about information such as numbers of incidents and enforcement actions in the previous year.

“Non-lab specific information is of very little use to community members living around these labs who are trying to understand the safety performance of their local select agent laboratory,” said Scott Yundt, staff attorney for Tri-Valley CAREs, a California group concerned about the safety of research at the federal government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Last fall, citing the USA TODAY NETWORK’s reporting, White House science and homeland security advisers called for information about research on potential bioterror pathogens and incidents in labs doing this work “be shared with the public, to the maximum extent possible.” It noted that keeping such information secret “has negligible security value” and pointed to incident information that has been voluntarily disclosed online for several years by the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas.

White House advisers call for greater accountability, safety at biolabs

Dan Sosin, acting director of the CDC’s Division of Select Agents and Toxins, said the transparency benchmark on the new website "is obviously one clearly stimulated by the work (USA TODAY NETWORK reporters) have been doing to improve the transparency of this program." He said the new website tracks progress only on a specific recommendation by White House advisers to make aggregate information public. “It’s intended to give a pretty broad snapshot of how the program operates,” he said.

Sosin said the report, scheduled to be made public in June, will provide tallies of the number of labs registered to work with select agents, the government’s term for bacteria, viruses and toxins that are regulated because they have the potential to be used as bioweapons. It will also provide counts of labs that have faced enforcement actions in 2015 and some general information about the type of safety or security issue that was involved. There will also be statistics about such things as security risk assessments, transfers of specimens and rankings of the most commonly registered pathogens.

The report, Sosin said, will give the public some sense of the low frequency of serious lab incidents and a general understanding of the kinds of issues found on inspections. “My hope is it will provide some reassurance,” he said.

Sanctioned biolabs' names still kept secret despite White House memo

Lab safety advocate Beth Willis said it’s good to have the aggregate information. “But it’s not particularly helpful to communities because we want to know what’s going on in our backyard,” said Willis, who is the former chair of a citizen lab advisory panel in Frederick, Md., where one of the nation’s largest biodefense research campuses is located at the Army’s Fort Detrick.

“My read on the White House memo last year was there was a commitment to making that happen,” Willis said.

Sosin said other federal working groups are separately looking at ways to provide guidance for how laboratories themselves, particularly those operated by the federal government, can do more to release information about their work and safety incidents.

Melissa Morland, president of ABSA International, a biosafety organization for lab professionals, called the new CDC website “a positive move towards transparency” that holds CDC accountable for making progress toward recommended changes.

Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, also praised the site as a “sea change” for regulated labs and the public. “I'm cautiously optimistic that the era of secrecy is behind us and engagement communication and learning has begun."

Usatoday

A series of incidents with anthrax, Ebola and a deadly strain of avian influenza at the CDC's labs in 2014 raised public and policymaker concern about the safety of biological research nationwide. During 2015, tests revealed that an Army lab had been mistakenly shipping live anthrax — labeled as killed specimens — to facilities around the world for a decade.

The USA TODAY NETWORK's investigation, among other things, revealed that more than 100 labs working with potential bioterror pathogens have faced secret federal sanctions for safety violations, yet regulators allowed them to keep experimenting while failing inspections, sometimes for years. Despite federal officials’ efforts to keep secret the identities of the troubled labs, the project named names, revealing they included several prestigious institutions. The series has resulted in ongoing bipartisan congressional investigations.

Read the full USA TODAY NETWORK "Biolabs in Your Backyard" investigation: biolabs.usatoday.com

Follow investigative reporter Alison Young on Twitter: @alisonannyoung