An Army bio-defense facility in Utah may have mistakenly sent live anthrax samples to 51 commercial companies, academic institutions and federal labs without proper safeguards, more than double the total disclosed last week, a widening Pentagon investigation has found.
Officials said Wednesday that the facilities are scattered across 17 states and the District of Columbia, as well as in Canada, Australia and Korea, suggesting a systemic lapse in the military's little-known program to study defenses against biological weapons agents, including anthrax.
Investigators at the Pentagon and the Centers for Disease Control have scrambled over the ten days to determine the size and scope of the problem.
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