From a NewScientist 'newsflash' I received this morning.

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Pandemic flu strain accidentally released

The virus that caused the 1957 "Asian flu" pandemic, which killed millions, has been sent to thousands of research centres worldwide. The mistake was only discovered after the virus escaped from a kit at a high-containment lab in Canada.

Click on the link below for the full story on NewScientist.com/news: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7261.


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Um, this doesn't sound good.

Reading the linked to article we find: "A few of the CAP kits were sent to labs in Asia, the Middle East and South America, as well as Europe and North America. The kits’ originators had to know what they contained, in order to evaluate the test results. However, when Canada’s National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg identified the strain on 26 March, it alerted the US Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. Worryingly, it initially found the potentially deadly virus in a sample unrelated to the test kit - meaning it had already escaped within the lab."

What stumps me is "The kits’ originators had to know what they contained, in order to evaluate the test results." yet as far as I could tell, there's no description of how / why the the firm chose the pandemic strain and either didn't catch the error or didn't tell anyone.