None were accidentally shipped to Iraq.
A laboratory on the grounds of the Pentagon compound is among dozens of facilities that may have mistakenly received live anthrax, officials said Tuesday.
Officials suggested the Pentagon lab case may have happened several years ago, although the timing was unclear. Some labs around the country and in South Korea mistakenly received the suspect anthrax in recent months.
A comprehensive investigation has been under way since last week.
The Pentagon has struggled to keep up with the expanding scope of its investigation into where the potentially live anthrax was sent after it mistakenly left the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and why it was not detected earlier. A key question is why some portion of Dugway’s anthrax samples were not rendered inactive, or dead, before sending them to research labs.
Earlier Tuesday, the Pentagon said it determined that possibly live anthrax was mistakenly sent to labs in Canada and Washington state, in addition to the numerous labs in the U.S. and abroad that were announced last week.
A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Steve Warren, said Canadian and Washington state authorities have been notified.
Patrick Gaebel, a spokesman for Health Canada, said Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was told by the Pentagon that a test kit sent there in 2006 could possibly contain live anthrax bacterium. Gaebel said the kit was intended for the lab to validate its anthrax detection system. He said they’ve located the testing kit and have confirmed it has not been used for over five years.