Downriver Today

Michigan's wildlife disease laboratory, the Michigan State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory in East Lansing, may have failed to identified a tuberculosis outbreak when it first surfaced, which would have been a missed opportunity to contain the disease last summer. 

The agency did acknowledge that it failed to implement routine screenings to make sure employees didn't have TB, Bridge Michigan reported. 

“We’re not sure when exposure for this individual might have occurred — it could have been 2017 or 2018,” Department of Natural Resources (DNR) spokesman Ed Golder told Bridge Michigan.

Five workers contracted TB, four of whom were thought to have caught it when examining killed deer. Bovine TB can be transmitted from cattle or deer to humans, but there aren't many reports documenting this actually happening. It can be treated, and treatment is typically necessary. 

But when the outbreak surfaced last year, the wildlife disease laboratory intended to keep it quiet, Bridge Michigan reported. Golder said it wasn't important to inform the public because those infected with TB weren't considered contagious. 

“It’s conceivable the increased (deer) volume in 2018 led to human error or some other problem," which ended up infecting the workers, Golder told Bridge Michigan. 

But one of the five workers was likely infected before the hunting season, unlike the other four. 

“This tech did not work in the (wildlife) lab during the 2018 season,” according to a staff update from August 2019. “So a potential occupational exposure would have been prior to 2018.”

Golder later told Bridge Michigan the update was inaccurate and the worker, a lab technician, had been at work during the 2018-19 hunting season and was likely exposed to TB before this time. 

“We have not said all the infections occurred in the 2018 season, only that this was the most likely time, given the other positive tests (last summer) and a dramatic jump in specimens,” Golder told Bridge Michigan.

The lab technician had been tested for TB in August 2017, which would mean he was infected sometime after then, Golder told Bridge Michigan. 

“The person wasn’t tested in August 2018… because of the expectation at the time that the employee would be leaving prior to the start of the 2018 deer season, rather than in October, as turned out to be the case,” Golder told Bridge Michigan. “It was only after we discovered infection at the lab (in June 2019) that the person, who at that point was not working for the DNR, was tested. That was in August 2019.”

He said that the agency wanted to be sure all lab staff and DNR staff were tested after the 2015-2017 lab period, but Bridge Michigan found this to be false after contacting Anna Mitterling, a DNR biologist. Mitterling told Bridge Michigan that no one reached out to her to be tested for TB after she volunteered in 2017, but believes her chances of having the disease are low. 

“The possibility is very remote,” Mitterling told Bridge Michigan. “I didn’t work on any deer from that region. They have different colored tags.”