*But they didn't find records of a 2004 accident in which a worker was stuck with a needle tainted with Brucella, a bacterium that can cause an infectious disease - an incident the university did not report.
Nor did investigators determine that unauthorized experiments with that agent were being conducted in university labs...
In the year after the CDC's 2006 inspection, A&M lost track of a mouse infected with Q Fever, which humans can contract from animals.
Two outside health care officials crossed paths with a Brucella researcher before the researcher had decontaminated after an experiment. And yet another lab worker reported high levels of Q fever antibodies.
The first time the CDC addressed any of these security breaches was in a nonroutine inspection this April, conducted in response to Texas
A&M reporting the Brucella incident more than a year late.
But what the three inspectors dispatched to the university in April found paled in comparison to what an 18-person team of federal agents uncovered in an emergency July inspection: Several missing vials of
Brucella, and at least seven cases in which Texas A&M allowed unauthorized access to select agents.
As a result, the university's select agent program remains on hold and two A&M research officials have resigned. The inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who levies financial penalties of up to $500,000 for biodefense security breaches, has not yet ruled on the A&M case.
