Deadly Flu Strain Shipped Worldwide
- From: "georgia" <jwissmille@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 22 Apr 2005 20:22:28 -0700
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47841-2005Apr12.html
The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 13, 2005; Page A01
Deadly Flu Strain Shipped Worldwide
Officials Race to Destroy Samples
By Rob Stein and Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writers
A dangerous strain of the flu virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in
1957
was sent to thousands of laboratories in the United States and around
the
world, triggering a frantic effort to destroy the samples to prevent an
outbreak, health officials revealed yesterday.
Because the virus is easily transmitted from person to person and many
people have no immunity to it, the discovery has raised alarm that it
could
cause another deadly pandemic if a laboratory worker became infected,
officials said.
As a result, health authorities were urgently working to make sure all
samples are destroyed and to closely monitor anyone who may have come
into
contact with the virus for signs of illness, officials said.
"This virus could cause a pandemic," said Klaus Stohr, the World Health
Organization's top flu expert. "We are talking about a fully
transmissible
human influenza virus to which the majority of the population has no
immunity. We are concerned."
Although no infections have been reported, and the chances of infection
are
probably low, the potential consequences are so grave that urgent steps
were
necessary, he said.
"If a laboratory accident were to occur, a person could become
infected. If
that happened, that person would likely fall ill and he or she could
infect
somebody else. And that could mark the beginning of a global outbreak,"
Stohr said.
WHO is working with the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention
in Atlanta and other national health agencies to contain the situation,
he
said, adding that "the level of concern about this virus is very high."
The virus, known as an H2N2 strain, killed 1 million to 4 million
people
worldwide in 1957 and 1958, including about 70,000 in the United
States.
Because the virus has not circulated in the wild since 1968, anyone
born
after that would have no natural immunity to it. Since then, the virus
has
been kept only in high-security biological laboratories.
The problem arose when a private company, Meridian Bioscience Inc. of
Cincinnati, sent a panel of virus samples to about 3,700 laboratories,
some
in doctors' offices, to be tested as part of routine quality-control
certification conducted by the College of American Pathologists. An
additional 2,750 laboratories, all in the United States, received the
samples as part of other certification processes and were asked to
destroy
them, CDC spokesman Dan Rutz said.
The panel samples usually include only strains of the flu virus that
are
relatively benign, Stohr said. "We would consider this an unwise and
unfortunate decision," he said.
The 3,700 samples were sent out beginning last fall, primarily to labs
in
the United States, although 14 were in Canada and 61 were in 16 other
countries, Stohr said.
"The people who are handling this are extremely experienced in dealing
with
potentially dangerous pathogens, and we have no reason to believe that
there
were any breaches," Rutz said. "But there's always a concern about a
virus
to which a sizable part of the population has no immunity, and we're
interested in seeing to it that it's neutralized as quickly as
possible."
The mistake came to light March 25 when the National Microbiology
Laboratory
in Winnipeg, Manitoba, identified the virus. "They were doing this
routine
testing and identified this virus and said, 'This shouldn't be here,' "
Rutz
said. Canadian officials notified WHO and the CDC on Friday.
"We have requested that additional measures be taken -- that the
laboratories have to acknowledge receipt of the message in written
form, to
confirm that they have destroyed any of these samples, and that they
would
monitor their laboratory staff for any respiratory disease," Stohr
said.
Robert G. Webster, a flu expert at St. Jude's Children's Research
Hospital
in Memphis, called the incident "a terrible, terrible mistake."
"I have been telling WHO for a number of years that this is a dangerous
virus that is still out there in more labs than they know," he said.
"This
may alert WHO and Homeland Security and whoever wants to know that each
and
every H2N2 sample from 1957 needs to be rounded up and locked down."
Neither the College of American Pathologists nor Meridian Bioscience
was
aware that the virus being shipped was the deadly 1957 strain, said
Jared
Schwartz, a pathologist and spokesman for the college. The college
asked the
company to ship a Type A strain of virus, he said, and Meridian's
paperwork
indicated that this strain was benign.
"For reasons I don't understand and Meridian doesn't understand, the
documentation they had was incorrect," he said, adding that the source
of
the mislabeling was unclear.
Meridian may have obtained the strain from another company that had
misidentified it, he said. Even had Meridian known it was the deadly
H2N2
strain, Schwartz said, current federal guidelines would have allowed
the
company to ship it. He said that neither the college nor the company
was
aware CDC was considering whether to reclassify the strain as too
deadly to
ship.
Schwartz said a mechanism is being established to require anyone
shipping
pathogens to notify the CDC about what strains of virus are involved.
William J. Motto, chairman and chief executive of Meridian Bioscience,
said
he had no comment last night.
Staff writer David Brown and research editor Lucy Shackelford
contributed to
this report
.
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