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The Utah laboratory that received live anthrax from Dugway Proving Ground last year followed all of its safety protocols and there was never any danger, a company vice president said last week.

Matt Scullion, vice president of sales and marketing at BioFire Defense, said the anthrax was always contained to either tubes or a laboratory hood.

"There was never any contamination," Scullion said.

Scullion said no one at BioFire was ever worried.

"We've been doing this before the anthrax letters of 2001," he said, "and we built in contingencies and plans around this sort of thing.

"That's what 20 years of work with the Department of Defense does for you. You become strict planners."

It was disclosed in May that live anthrax from Dugway, an Army research facility in Utah's west desert, had been shipped to 194 other labs, including facilities in all 50 U.S. states and nine countries. The anthrax was supposed to have been killed before leaving Dugway. The problem came to light when a commercial lab in Maryland tested a shipment from Dugway and found live bacteria.

Faulty science was blamed for the mistakes. There were no reports of the anthrax sickening anyone in Utah or in any other states or countries that received the live samples.

The Army has declined to provide a comprehensive list of the laboratories that received the shipments, citing safety concerns. Scullion and Allyn Nakashima, the state epidemiologist at the Utah Department of Health, both acknowledged last week that BioFire was Utah's live anthrax recipient.

BioFire Defense has facilities in Murray while a subsidiary, BioFire Diagnostics, has them in Research Park at the University of Utah. Over the years BioFire has developed and marketed a variety of diagnostic and testing products including testing kits for agents such as anthrax and Ebola.

Scullion declined to specify what the anthrax it received from Dugway was supposed to be tested on.

He would only say: "Anthrax is considered a bioweapon so it falls on our list of what we work on, what we develop tests on."

Lab workers followed a procedure that treated all anthrax specimens as though they were live, Scullion said. Anthrax testing at the lab occurs in a restricted area that Scullion is not allowed to enter, he added.

Scullion said the Department of Defense notified BioFire in May as soon as it realized the error.

The Utah Department of Health was eventually notified, too, and conversed with the U.S. Centers For Disease Control to provide BioFire with a procedure for cleaning the laboratory. The health department also worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to get quick approval to use a regulated cleaning agent.

The cleaning was conducted June 12, according to documents from the health department.

"We've known about that lab for a long time, and they're very conscientious," said Nakashima, the state epidemiologist.

Scullion said BioFire's contract with the Defense Department has mechanisms where they can recover some of the clean-up costs. He declined to say if the company would do so, but said there has not been a significant revenue loss from Dugway's mistake.

"We're working around it at the moment and they're working on resolving the issue in the Department of Defense," Scullion said. "It hasn't slowed us down at all."

Twitter: @natecarlisle