The alarming number of laboratory accidents involving deadly diseases and harmful agents is raising safety concerns in the U.S. Congress.

Recent reports said a lab in Montana experimenting on the Ebola virus saw the escape of one of its patient mice infected with the virus.

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Around the same month at St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, a worker got cut in a lab along with ferrets infected by a strain of the deadly avian influenza.

While nobody was really injured or made seriously ill because of these incidents, they're all causing concern in Congress as to the safety of labs in America.

The Federal Select Agent program oversees government and university laboratories that work on viruses, bacteria and diseases.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture jointly run the program since the select agents could be deadly to people.

For years though, the Government Accountability Office (the investigative arm of Congress) has warned that no single federal entity is responsible for the oversight of high-containment labs.

There are also no clear national standards and practices for their design or operation.

The incidents coupled with the flawed system are why Congress is investigating these high-containment labs in the first place.

Edward Hammond, former director of now-defunct independent lab watchdog company Sunshine Project, said in order for policymakers to make the right decisions, they need to know what's happening in these labs.

While these labs don't publicly release details of their accidents due to bioterrorism laws, there have been more than 1,100 incidents involving select agents between 2008 and 2012.

TagsAccidents, Congress, The Federal Select Agent, CDC, US Department of Agriculture