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Army Finds Another Batch of Live Anthrax

Another batch of live anthrax has turned up – this one from the same batch as samples sent to Australia from an Army lab.
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By Jim Miklaszewski

Another batch of live anthrax has turned up – this one from the same batch as samples sent to Australia from the Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.

Defense officials tell NBC News the anthrax spores had been irradiated to kill them in 2008.

This does not necessarily mean the samples sent to the lab in Australia contained live anthrax spores, the officials say. They’ve been testing samples thought to have been inactivated ever since it turned out Dugway had sent potentially live spores to labs in nine states and an air base in South Korea.

Experts say it’s very difficult to inactivate a large batch of anthrax spores and say it’s a problem across U.S. labs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is helping investigate the matter, says no member of the public is in danger and people who may have been exposed to the anthrax spores are taking antibiotics just to be safe.

Jim Miklaszewski

Jim Miklaszewski is the chief Pentagon correspondent for NBC News. On 9/11, he was the first at the scene to report that the Pentagon had been attacked and has since led the network's coverage of the war in Afghanistan.

Since joining NBC in 1985, Miklaszewski was a White House correspondent during the Clinton and Bush administrations, covering President Clinton's transition from Little Rock, his many trips abroad including Moscow and the Middle East and his reelection. He was also an NBC floor reporter at the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1996 and 2000.

In the Bush White House, Miklaszewski reported on the Gulf War with Iraq, summits with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and the Bush reelection campaign in 1992.

Miklaszewski has logged considerable foreign experience with battlefront coverage of wars in Lebanon, El Salvador and the Falkland Islands. He also covered the United States air raid on Libya, and the "tanker wars" in the Persian Gulf.