Alison Young

USA TODAY

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday they have identified 34 incident reports involving bioterror pathogens mishandled at CDC labs that were “inadvertently” not disclosed in 2014 to congressional investigators who had asked for the information.

The reports document inventory issues, specimens in unapproved areas and a few potential exposure incidents that occurred from early 2007 through January 2011, primarily at the CDC’s Fort Collins, Colo., infectious disease laboratory complex, said Steve Monroe, the CDC’s top lab safety official.

All involved certain heavily regulated agricultural viruses — such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus — classified by the federal government as “select agents” because of their potential to be used as bioweapons and cause significant economic harm.

“It was an inadvertent omission,” Monroe said. He said all of the reports have now been given to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which had asked for the information two years ago in the wake of a CDC lab mishap in Atlanta that potentially exposed dozens of workers to live anthrax.

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., the committee's chairman, expressed dismay about the kind of "chronic negligence" that's been revealed in recent years "involving the world's most terrifying pathogens." Someone is going to get hurt, he said.

"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.

The committee began questioning the accuracy of the CDC’s 2014 accounting of incidents after USA TODAY last month revealed that some labs associated with one principal scientist at the CDC's Fort Collins facility had had their federal select agent permit secretly suspended from about 2007 until 2010 for violations while experimenting with Japanese encephalitis virus. But the incident was not included in information CDC Director Tom Frieden sent to the committee in August 2014 that was supposed to cover select agent incidents at all CDC labs since 2002.

Monroe said that the agency’s response mistakenly only included information about incidents that occurred at the CDC’s labs in metro Atlanta, where the agency is headquartered, but not at its labs in other cities.

An ongoing USA TODAY NETWORK investigation has revealed how a system of fragmented lab oversight and pervasive secrecy obscures failings by facilities and regulators — keeping the public and Congress in the dark. There is no national reporting system for laboratory incidents and accidents, making it impossible for risks to be assessed and safety trends to be analyzed and shared to prevent future accidents.

Newly disclosed CDC biolab failures 'like a screenplay for a disaster movie'

Not only does the CDC operate its own labs, but — along with the Department of Agriculture — it also jointly runs the Federal Select Agent Program, which regulates public and private labs working with select agent pathogens.

Monroe, whose new lab safety office was created last year to be a single point of accountability within CDC, said staff in his office now have access to all incident reports involving select agent pathogens — regardless where they happen at CDC facilities. And Monroe said the CDC has an agency-wide initiative to raise awareness of the need to report safety accidents and "near-miss" incidents of all kinds, not just involving labs but also risks for trips and falls and other hazards to workers.

Monroe said the CDC is committed to greater transparency about laboratory incidents and is part of a Department of Health and Human Services work group that is discussing ways to provide standardized lab incident reports to the public. “We believe that it is important for the public to be aware of the kinds of incidents that occur at our facilities,” he said.

CDC lacked key lab incident reporting policy despite scrutiny, promises

While the CDC’s Fort Collins campus accounted for the majority of the missing incidents, CDC labs in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Anchorage each had an incident during the request period involving discovery of a select agent pathogen specimen in an area not registered to have it.

Monroe said about 30 of the incident reports not previously given to Congress were the result of an intensive specimen inventory review at the Fort Collins campus during Nov. 2010 through Jan. 2011 that identified vials in secure but unapproved freezers and cold storage areas. Each discovery resulted in a report to regulators at the Federal Select Agent Program, he said.

A small number of the reports involved potential exposure incidents that occurred while lab workers were doing the vial-by-vial 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, he said.

Read full coverage of the USA TODAY NETWORK's "Biolabs in Your Backyard" investigation at: biolabs.usatoday.com.

Follow investigative reporter Alison Young on Twitter: @alisonannyoung.