Washington Post
April 13, 2005

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 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 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.

William J. Motto, chairman and chief executive of Meridian Bioscience,
said he had no comment last night.