Investigation of bio-labs grows

WASHINGTON – Calling it “a most urgent public health and national security issue,” two ranking lawmakers said Friday they are expanding their congressional investigation into the risks associated with the nation’s bio-defense labs to focus on how someone as mentally unstable as accused anthrax killer Bruce E. Ivins could have worked unsupervised with deadly biological agents for so long.

Reps. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House’s Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., head of the panel’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said they will probe personnel security at Fort Detrick, Md., which allowed Ivins to work with anthrax cultures for at least seven years after he began showing signs of paranoia and mental instability.

Ivins, 62, also was allowed to work in the lab long after the FBI determined that he was the likely culprit in the 2001 attacks that killed five people and sickened 17. He died July 29 after ingesting a fatal dose of acetaminophen as authorities were preparing to charge him with murder.

Also Friday, the U.S. government officially cleared another researcher of any complicity in the attacks. Dr. Steven J. Hatfill didn’t get the apology that he was looking for. But the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeffrey A. Taylor, sent a letter to one of Hatfill’s lawyers saying the existing evidence “excluded your client as a subject or target of the investigation.”