A panel of safety experts has ripped the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after a series of high-profile and dangerous mistakes last year alone involving Ebola, anthrax, and bird flu.

One mistake involved the Ebola virus and another involved anthrax, which prompted Tom Frieden, the head of the agency, to tell Congress that he was dealing with those safety concerns and had convened the panel to review the CDC’s practices, according to a UPI report.

The panel took months to evaluate the agency and the missteps, three of which happened in 2014. The results were delivered in January but the CDC only just now released them.

The report found that leadership’s “commitment toward safety has been inconsistent and insufficient at multiple levels,” and that safety was not a big part of strategic planning or CDC culture on an agency-wide basis.

Also, the worst responses seem to happen at biosafety levels 3 and 4, the top two levels, “especially among those holding a master’s degree,” the report found.

In one incident last year, the CDC had sent a biological specimen that had been cross-contaminated with a strain of bird flu to a facility, and in another, live anthrax was mishandled and 86 CDC workers may have been exposed, according to a USA Today report.

But that wasn’t it for 2014. In December, specimens of the Ebola virus were mixed up and a lab worker was potentially exposed, leading the agency to monitor the worker for three weeks.

The panel suggested that the CDC work to improve safety training and quality control protocols, as well as better staff communication, to help prevent future safety breaches.

While the panel found that individual divisions had been proactive in working to find a solution, it is incumbent on the CDC to make it an agency-wide issue and make such safety awareness part of its culture, adding that “all persons are accountable.”

In addition, the panel suggested that a new position be created to handle these matters and enforce them.

Worryingly, the panel also noted that workers are reluctant to report safety issues due to potential repercussions and the security nature of violations, which has contributed to a lack of accountability at the agency. This contributed to the incident last June where the highly pathogenic bird flu contaminated a substance, as a “significant percentage” of staff at the CDC were concerned about negative repercussions if they reported the incident.

A total of 20 recommendations were made in an effort to address the safety problems in the agency, and the CDC pledged to start implementing the recommendations.

The panel did not hold back in its criticism, saying that it was “very concerned that the CDC is on the way to losing credibility.” It was formed by a group of external biosafety experts that the agency had appointed after the incidents raised concerns both inside and outside the organization. The panel warned the CDC not to view itself as “special,” and that controls and rules that apply to the rest of the world apply to the CDC as well.

CDC Director Tom Frieden told Congress in the middle of last year that he would deal with the safety issues. Text posted with the report states that the CDC concurs with the recommendations in the report.

However, even after Frieden pledged changes to Congress, another high-profile incident put a black mark on the CDC’s reputation after a mix-up of Ebola specimens resulted in the exposure of a worker, who was later found to not have contracted the virus.

The findings of the report included the revelation that risk assessments were either not being done in a standardized manner or not being done at all, and that laboratory safety training was both inadequate and inconsistent.

The report also found that CDC employees often didn’t understand what the proper response was for accidents, especially at high biosafety levels and for people who held masters degrees.

CDC labs also tend to focus more on bioterrorism than they do on the safety of their workers, which was the case in the potentially deadly strain of bird flu that contaminated a substance.

The panel overall made a total of 20 recommendations, which the CDC says it will begin to implement, and the agency has created a new position of associate director for Laboratory Science and Safety that will report to the director of the CDC. The budget request for the agency includes $20 million to boost lab safety.

The CDC is the leading public health institute in the United States, a federal agency that falls under the Department of Health and Human Services and is headquartered in Georgia near Atlanta. Its main charge is to protect the public health by controlling disease, injury, and disability, with a focus on prevention.