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A federal inspection team is in College Station this week to begin the recertification process for Texas A&M University's biodefense labs, where research was suspended last summer.
The team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be on campus through Thursday, focusing on facilities and procedures, a Texas A&M spokesman said.
Specifically, the spokesman said, the group will check to see if A&M addressed the dozens of problems surrounding its biodefense research that were outlined in an exhaustive CDC report issued last year.
"I think that everything is fair game," said Jason Cook, vice president for marketing and communication.
Cook said A&M administrators met with the team Tuesday morning for an entrance interview. The inspectors suggested this visit would be the first in a "number of visits" planned for the campus.
It was unclear exactly how many visits the team would make to Aggieland as part of the recertification process or how long it would be before A&M could resume its vaccination and therapeutic research, he said.
CDC spokesman Von Roebuck confirmed that a team was working this week at Texas A&M and noted there was no set time frame or number of visits required as part of the certification process.
"If you recall, we did have areas we felt needed to be taken care of and looked at. This is an ongoing investigation just to see so far what progress has been made and see where things are going to go," Roebuck said. "We're working together to try to move the situation forward."
The CDC review process at A&M is not unlike its review process for other labs working with select agents and toxins, Roebuck said. This is, however, the first time the CDC has felt the need to suspend research in a lab that was under investigation, the spokesman said. He noted that A&M had been cooperating with the agency.
"We had a concern about the fact that we had investigated previously and felt things weren't moving along as we would have liked them to have," Roebuck said, explaining that goal of the investigation simply was to ensure safety.
The site visits comes just weeks after A&M announced it would pay a $1 million federal fine -- described as an unprecedented figure -- for violations within its biodefense program.
The CDC began investigating A&M in April after learning that a researcher had been accidentally infected with brucella a year earlier. Federal law requires such incidents be reported within seven days. The federal agency temporarily banned A&M's work with bioweapons last summer after learning three more researchers had been exposed to Q fever about the same time as the original infection.
In September, the CDC issued a scathing and exhaustive report detailing issues such as poor record-keeping, training and containment practices as well as problems with access to biodefense labs.
A&M originally offered to pay a $10,000 fine. Elsa Murano, who became university president in January, has said she decided to offer $1 million to show that A&M took the violations seriously.
• Holly Huffman's e-mail address is holly.huffman@theeagle.com.
