Via C-Health, a CP story with no byline but likely written by Helen Branswell: Officials investigate how bird flu viruses were sent to unsuspecting labs. Excerpt:
Officials are trying to get to the bottom of how vaccine manufacturer Baxter International Inc. made an experimental vaccine contaminated with the H5N1 avian flu virus and then distributed it to an Austrian company.
That company, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then disseminated the material to subcontractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.
Authorities in the four European countries are looking into the incident, and their efforts are being closely watched by the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Control.
Though it appears none of the 36 or 37 people who were exposed to the contaminated vaccine became infected, the incident is being described as "a serious error" on the part of Baxter, which is on the brink of securing a European licence for an H5N1 vaccine. That vaccine is made at a different facility, in the Czech Republic.
"For this particular incident ... the horse did not get out (of the barn)," Dr. Angus Nicoll of the ECDC said from Stockholm.
"But that doesn't mean that we and WHO and the European Commission and the others aren't taking it as seriously as you would any laboratory accident with dangerous pathogens - which you have here."
Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses - if that indeed happened - could have resulted in dire consequences.
Nicoll said officials still aren't 100 per cent sure the mixture contained live H5N1 viruses. But given that ferrets exposed to the mixture died, it likely did.
