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"Protecting the health and informed consent rights of children since 1982."
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BL Fisher Note:
The U.S. has been preparing for a flu pandemic since the 1980's and in
earnest for the past five years. The Pandemic Flu Plan is in place and ready
to be implemented, including a CDC public information campaign heightening
fear of flu and recent recommendations that infants, children and adults get
flu vaccinations every year. All that is missing is a strain of flu that
will trigger a government declared "emergency" and allow an "Emergency Use
Authorization" under Project Bioshield legislation which can set the stage
for mass use of unapproved vaccines or vaccines used for unapproved
purposes. The fate of the human race increasingly appears to be in the hands
of M.D./Ph.D.'s with too much power who make mistakes.
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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