LONDON (AP)– Thousands of scientists were scrambling Tuesday at the urging of globalhealth authorities to destroy vials of a pandemic flu strain sent to labs in 18countries as part of routine testing.
The rush,urged by the World Health Organization, was sparked by a slim, but real, riskthat the samples, could spark a global flu epidemic. The vials of virus sent bya U.S. company went to nearly 5,000 labs, mostly in the United States,officials said.
“The risk isrelatively low that a lab worker will get sick, but a large number of labs gotit and if someone does get infected, the risk of severe illness is high andthis virus has shown to be fully transmissible,” WHO’s influenza chief, KlausStohr, told The Associated Press.
It was notimmediately clear why the 1957 pandemic strain, which killed between 1 millionand 4 million people — was in the proficiency test kits routinely sent to labs.
It was adecision that Stohr described as “unwise,” and “unfortunate.”
Thatparticular bug was “an epidemic virus for many years,” Stohr said from the U.N.health agency’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. “The risk is low butthings can go wrong as long as these samples are out there and there are somestill out there.”
The 1957strain has not been included in the flu vaccine since 1968, and anyone bornafter that date has no immunity to it.
Dr. NancyCox, chief of the influenza branch at the federal Centers for Disease Controland Prevention in Atlanta, said her agency was notified of the situation Fridaymorning. She also said officials strongly doubt someone deliberately plantedthe dangerous germ or that this was an act of bioterrorism.
“It wouldn’tbe a smart way to start a pandemic to send it to laboratories because we havepeople well trained in biocontainment,” she said.
The concernover the shipment of pandemic flu virus to thousands labs renews questionsabout the safe handling of deadly germs _ an issue that led to toughened U.S.rules after anthrax was sent in the mail in 2001, killing five Americans.
Most of theflu samples — 3,747 — were sent starting last year at the request of theCollege of American Pathologists, which helps labs do proficiency testing. Thelast shipments were sent out in February.
Dr. JaredSchwartz, an official with the pathology college, said a private company,Meridian Bioscience Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio, is paid to prepare the samples.The firm was told to pick an influenza A sample and chose from its stockpilethe deadly 1957 H2N2 strain.
Stohr saidU.S. health officials also reported to WHO that some other test kit providersbesides the college used the 1957 pandemic strain in samples sent to labs inthe United States. Schwartz identified them as Medical Lab Evaluators, theAmerican Association of Bioanalysts and the American Association of Family Practitioners.
Almost 99percent of the labs that got the test kits are in the United States, Stohrsaid. Fourteen were in Canada and 61 samples went to labs in 16 other countriesin Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, according to the WHO.
Some of thelabs outside the United States have already destroyed their samples, he said,and WHO is hoping that the rest of the vials will be destroyed by Friday. Thehealth agency wouldn’t name the other countries whose labs received thesamples.
The test kitsare used for internal quality control checks to demonstrate that a lab is ableto correctly identify viruses or as a way for labs to get certified by theCollege of American Pathologists.
The kitsinvolve blind samples. The lab then has to correctly identify the pathogen inthe vial in order to pass the test. Usually, the influenza virus included inthese kits is one that is currently circulating, or at least one that hasrecently been in circulation.
