Posted on behalf of Erika Check Hayden

Under increasing scrutiny, the US government biodefence laboratory at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, has called a suspension on most of its work involving pathogens.

The suspension, first reported by Science magazine’s blog, was called by the lab’s commander, John P. Skvorak, so that the lab could take an inventory of all ‘historical samples’ of pathogens stored at the lab.

These historical samples are mainly older pathogens “left behind by people who don’t work here any more, primarily in freezer storage,” said Caree Vander Linden, a spokesperson for the lab. “We need to accession those into [our] database or destroy them, basically – reset our baseline so we can move on.” She said the halt may last up to three months and will stop all work done in biosafety level 2, 3 and 4 laboratories.

Long the target of criticism from scientists who accused the lab of lax safety procedures, Ft. Detrick was again put under the microscope in 2001, when a former employee of the lab was fingered as a “person of interest” in the anthrax attacks that killed five people. That person was cleared, but another Ft. Detrick researcher, Bruce Ivins, emerged as another possible suspect and committed suicide last year.

The New York Times reported that an unidentified researcher at Ft. Detrick said that colleagues sometimes left behind unknown samples after departing the lab, but that “the Army’s recordkeeping and security were imperfect but better than procedures at most universities, where research on biological pathogens has expanded rapidly since 2001.”

The National Academy of Sciences is convening a panel to review the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s work on the anthrax attacks.