More than a month after the anthrax samples at Iowa State were destroyed, veterinary medicine officials remain confident about their decision.

The Veterinary Medicine Labs at Iowa State destroyed its entire collection of anthrax samples Oct. 11-12 in response to bioterrorism scares and security concerns. The decision was made following a false connection of Iowa labs to the anthrax outbreaks in Florida and the posting of guards at vet med labs.

“On Oct. 9, a media report out of Florida stated that the anthrax that killed a man in Florida was stolen from a lab in Iowa,” said James Roth, distinguished professor of veterinary microbiology and preventative medicine.

Roth said the FBI reported the connection was false several days later. However, Gov. Tom Vilsack already had responded to the situation by posting guards at the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Veterinary Services Laboratory and the Veterinary Medicine Labs in Ames. Guards also were posted at the University of Iowa Hygienic Lab.

“The Iowa Highway Patrol stood guard outside of our laboratory 24 hours a day because [Vilsack] wanted to make sure that no one could come in and take any of our anthrax samples,” Roth said. “They stayed until we destroyed the samples.”

The decision to destroy vet med’s collection of anthrax cultures was made by Vet Med Dean Norman Cheville, Associate Dean Don Reynolds and Roth.

“The first question that we wanted to answer was were these test tubes relevant to the investigation into the current anthrax bioterrorism investigation and the anthrax scare nationally,” Cheville said.

Vet med personnel asked the state department of environmental health and safety to contact the FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labs about the relevance of their samples, Cheville said.

“The FBI responded by saying that the samples weren’t important for the ongoing investigation and it was all right from their viewpoint if we destroyed these specimens,” Cheville said.

The second question vet med officials dealt with concerned the importance of the cultures for genetic seed stock in other national repositories, he said.

The two main repositories in the nation are the National Veterinary Services Lab in Ames and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md., Cheville said.

“Vet Med was not the only location that had these samples or these types of samples,” said Jim Dickson, associate professor and chairman of microbiology.

Vet med personnel also considered whether destroying the anthrax samples would hinder its own research, Cheville said, and “the answer is no.”

The last question concerned the educational value of the samples because they had been used for teaching, Cheville said.

“It would have cost us $30,000 a month to have this guarded,” he said. “We wanted to direct that money into education.”

“The reason we decided to destroy them is they were not needed, and we did not want the highway patrol to have three shifts a day sitting outside our laboratory,” Roth said.

“Especially after Sept. 11, they have better things to do than guard samples that are of no use.”