turning to events in washington and politics around the country. new york republican congressman peter king who serves on homeland security joins me now from long island from west babylon, long island. thank you for waiting as we went through that very sad press conference from texas. terrible. as your constituents got through super storm sandy, you know the devastation these people in texas are now going through as well. wanted to ask you about our reporting from jim about anthrax. how does it get sent to nine locations around the country and military base in south korea by fedex potentially exposing employees on base? i can t believe anthrax is sent by fedex.
i thought this would be highly secure and protected. we saw what happened september 11th when anthrax was mailed around. to me, to allow anyone whether fedex employee or receiving end of the lab, company to access this or allow for a mistake in shipping. i don t care how good fedex is i would never take that chance to have this kind of live anthrax being shipped around the country and around the world. nine labs in 20 states and south korea. it just to me it s beyond me. it makes no sense at all. is this something for armed services, for homeland security. is there oversight congress should get into? i think first of all you have dodd department of defense has to explain what they re doing, what s in place to make sure it doesn t happen again. department of homeland security has to be involved because of the threat of any of this anthrax being distributed around the country.
paid for by abc, inc. from abc news, this is world news now with t.j. holmes and reena ninan. one of those days. one of those days. happy friday eve to you. happy friday eve to you. weekend s almost here. almost, almost. adrienne we ve got a live show going on here. live show. is there something you d like to tell us. let s stop everything. one of our producers apparently has something to tell us. go ahead adrienne. the burgers are good. it s national burger day. glad we stopped the top of the show adrienne. thank you. it happens. nobody can tell when we re working or not because we always look like we re not working. good morning to you. thanks for spending some of your thursday here with us. we ll begin with that major mistake. how did this happen? how is this possible? the u.s. military sending live anthrax spores to government and commercial labs. we re not making this up.
hazard hazardous and dangerous kind of material is sent commercially by fedex. according to officials here, the shipping packaging was all done in accordance with strict guidelines to assure the public safety. one additional fact. cdc is collecting all samples from those 19 locations in the states and south korea in an effort to determine if there are any other live anthrax spores included. they re so confident in the procedure they re having those samples fedexed to atlanta. it raises a lot of questions in a lot of people s minds what about is being shipped publicly over these commercial carriers. jim, it does indeed. now the latest recovery
those labs expected to receive dead samples. four people in three of those labs worked with the anthrax and the cdc recommended antibiotics for them. let s get to pierre thomas with the latest on this one. and state health departments are racing to make sure no one has been contaminated by anthrax accidentally shipped from a military weapons facility and the centers for disease control is on the ground in utah working to find out how and why the pentagon shipped commercially some live anthrax spores from a facility in utah to labs in nine states and another in south korea. so far health officials say the risk for exposure to the deadly biological agent is low, but health and research officials have fanned out to all those labs to see how the material was handled and if personnel were exposed. the defense department normally ships live anthrax at high levels of biosecurity but in this case they were shipped at a lower level because the spores were thought to be dead.