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Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending April 25th, 2005

Health experts have destroyed two-thirds of the specimens of a killer influenza virus sent as part of routine test kits around the world, the U.N. health agency said Friday. It said it was still trying to trace two shipments that were supposed to go to Mexico and Lebanon.

The World Health Organization has been urging thousands of labs in 18 countries which received vials of the nearly 50-year-old H2N2 virus to destroy the samples amid fears of a global pandemic should the virus be released.

WHO's influenza chief Klaus Stohr said 10 of the countries which had received samples had confirmed their labs had destroyed the virus. Labs in Lebanon and Mexico, however, "never received the specimen even though they were on the distribution list," Stohr said.

He said it was possible the shipments had never been sent out at all, but he could not be sure. WHO has requested an investigation into the missing kits, he said.

Stohr said Hong Kong, Belgium, Singapore, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Taiwan had all confirmed their labs had destroyed their samples of the deadly flu strain that caused a pandemic in 1957.

The 1957 pandemic strain killed between 1 million and 4 million people...

Some two-thirds of the 3,700 laboratories worldwide that received samples of a killer flu virus in test kits have destroyed them as instructed, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.

Most of the labs are in the United States, but the rest are scattered in 17 countries, 12 of which have replied that they had disposed of their samples, according to Klaus Stohr, head of the WHO's influenza programme.

"Two-thirds of this material has been destroyed and the rest of the material is also hopefully subject to destruction very fast," he told a news conference in Geneva.

However, the United Nations agency was still investigating what had happened to samples listed as having gone to two laboratories in Mexico and Lebanon. The virus did not arrive at either place, but it may never have been sent, Stohr said.

The U.S. College of American Pathologists (CAP) distributed the virus, starting in October last year, as part of routine testing of laboratories' ability to detect strains. Although it was legal to use the "Asian" flu virus, which killed between one and four million people in 1957, the WHO said it was an "unwise" choice for such tests. It has called for the bug to be put on a higher security rating so that laboratories take even more precautions when handling it. So far there have been no reports of any infections and the fact that laboratories are used to handling such things means that the chances of its escaping into the community are remote, according to the WHO.

The virus is the only old influenza bug still kept in laboratories and to which most people would have no antibodies. But back in 1957...

The US government has told more than 3,700 laboratories in 18 countries to destroy potentially lethal influenza samples sent out in testing kits.

The samples are of "Asian flu", which killed between one and four million people in 1957 but disappeared by 1968. If the virus is not handled properly, "it can easily cause an influenza epidemic", Klaus Stohr of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned. The virus was sent to Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America.

The full list of countries and areas where laboratories received the virus is: Bermuda, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and the US.

Hong Kong radio announced on Wednesday that the virus had been destroyed there.

Because the virus has not been in circulation since 1968, people born after that do not have antibodies against it - and current vaccines do not guard against it.

"If this virus were to infect one person, it would spread very rapidly," Dr Stohr, the WHO's influenza expert, told the BBC.

The College of American Pathologists sent out kits containing between October 2004 and February of this year.

On 8 April, the US government asked the body to write to the laboratories affected - of which 61 are outside the US and Canada - telling them to destroy the samples.

Given the concerns that the virus could be used in bio-terrorism...

Flu used to be the "Rodney Dangerfield of diseases," as Tim Uyeki puts it. Uyeki is a flu epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, and he's been concerned that for years people didn't give influenza the respect it deserved.

But now flu has all the attention any germ can get. First, there was a flu vaccine shortage over the winter, prompting long lines and provoking rage from people who couldn't get their shots. Later, bird flu mesmerized the world, with the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) keeping up a steady drumbeat: A flu pandemic -- overdue for decades -- would be upon us at any moment. Finally, it was announced that a pandemic flu strain had been accidentally sent to influenza labs around the world as part of a testing kit by Meridian Bioscience, a contractor for the College of American Pathologists.

The jittery WHO, poised for catastrophe, insisted on the immediate destruction of the strain, for fear of accidental release. And while the threat posed by Meridian's error is far less than initial reports suggested, the reality is that lab accidents do happen. What's more, the feverish anxiety of public health officials to head off a new influenza pandemic may be generating the greatest influenza threat we face.

The threat is man-made. Scientists in the United States and Great Britain are studying the deadliest flu epidemic of the last century, the 1918 pandemic. In order to learn what made it kill so many, they are working on producing artificial viruses that replace common human flu genes with 1918 genes. An accidental release of one of their constructs could make the Meridian error look as menacing as a cauliflower.

The flu strain sent out by Meridian is known as H2N2/Japan. H2N2 strains first appeared in 1957..