“As rising floodwaters swamped New Orleans, Louisiana’s chief epidemiologist enlisted state police on a mission to break into a high-security government lab and destroy any dangerous germs before they could escape or fall into the wrong hands,” Paul Elias and Alicia Chang of Associated Press reported.

“Armed with bolt cutters and bleach, Dr. Raoult Ratard’s team entered the state’s so-called hot lab, and killed all the living samples.” Elias and Chang revealed no details about the species identity of the “living samples” at that lab, but noted that “Louisiana State University lost 8,000 lab animals, including mice, rats, dogs and monkeys. Many drowned. Others died without food and water, and the rest were euthanized,” according to LSU Health Sciences Center School of Medicine dean Larry Hollier.

Researcher Paul K. Whel-ton, M.D. confirmed the deaths in an interview with Laurie Barclay of Medscape.

But some animals were apparently missed. Rescuers recovered “a couple of chinchillas and 16 dogs” from the LSU medical center, said Matthew Davis of the BBC.

Added Elias and Chang, “In Covington, just north of New Orleans, Tulane’s high-security National Primate Research Center reported only minor damage and said none of its 5,000 research animals escaped.”

Other Tulane facilities were hard-hit.

Chip Price, vice president of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, in a September 8 e-mail to AALAS members mentioned that Tulane animal care staff and volunteers from other institutions “removed 175 boxes of transgenic mice” from the Tulane Main Campus animal laboratories, killing all others. The Tulane Medical Center animals were “fed and watered” on September 7, Price said, and were to be either removed or killed on the 8th. All animals were believed to have been killed at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, Price said.

Price listed eight other labs in the path of Katrina that apparently lost no animals, and two more about which no information was available.