Off Beat: Bird flu mix-up could have spelled disaster

[Paul Ferguson <fergdawgster () gmail com>]

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- From the "Oh shit" Department...

Via New Scientist.

[snip]

IT'S emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an
Austrian lab last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before
anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1
got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could
unleash a pandemic.

Last December, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a
batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir
Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech
Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets
inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained
live H5N1, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two seem to have been
mixed in error.

Markus Reinhard of Baxter says no one was infected because the H3N2 was
handled at a high level of containment. But Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus
University in the Netherlands says: "We need to go to great lengths to make
sure this kind of thing doesn't happen."

[snip]

Ya think?

Link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126983.400-bird-flu-mixup-could-hav
e-spelled-disaster.htm

- - ferg


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-- 
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawgster(at)gmail.com
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
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