A College Lab Mix-Up Left Over 30 People Thinking They Were Exposed to a Deadly Pathogen
· Vice
Thirty-two people thought they were exposed to a deadly bacterium during a 2025 college microbiology lab exercise, according to the CDC’s recently released Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
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It’s a classic blunder-headed mix-up, but one that could potentially have been tragic.
It was just a routine laboratory classroom exercise wherein students in Utah were supposed to identify Plesiomonas shigelloides, a fairly innocuous bacterium. They weren’t told what it was beforehand. They had to go in blind and had to determine what they were looking at after conducting a series of laboratory tests. Turns out the students actually learned something in class, because every group identified the sample as Neisseria meningitidis, the dangerous bacterium that can cause meningitis.
The students, professors, and lab techs might have all been exposed to a deadly bacterium. Proper precautions were taken, for the most part. They wore gloves and lab coats, but to truly protect against Neisseria meningitidis, you should wear masks, too, to prevent it from spreading through the air.
Nobody involved wore masks.
A College Microbiology Lab Thought It Exposed Students to a Deadly Bacterium
32 of the 33 potentially exposed then started a 10-day course of preventive antibiotics. Two of them developed headaches serious enough to send them to the ER, where they underwent spinal taps to rule out meningococcal disease.
State public health investigators found that the mysterious bacterium the students were asked to identify was actually a totally different one altogether: Neisseria sicca, a cousin of Neisseria meningitidis. It behaves similarly to its deadly cousin, and as evidenced by this whole near-catastrophe, can be easily confused for it, but it lacks its cousin’s deadliness.
The scare ended without anyone being exposed to meningococcal disease, but the whole affair did expose some major failures in the laboratory inventory management system and the execution of safety protocols.
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