US army anthrax mistake technical

Washington - The US Army's top general says human error probably was not a factor in the inadvertent shipping of live anthrax to research laboratories.

General Ray Odierno is the Army chief of staff. Odierno told reporters on Thursday the problem may have been a failure in the technical process of killing, or inactivating, anthrax samples.

He says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is looking at that aspect of what went wrong at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army installation in the state of Utah that sent the anthrax to government and commercial labs in nine states across the US and to an Army lab in South Korea.

The Pentagon disclosed on Wednesday that at least one of nine labs in the US that received anthrax got live rather than dead bacteria.