Considering the amount of time spent on disaster scenarios involving a global bird flu pandemic, you would think that this story would at least get a mention somewhere here in America. And of course, you'd be wrong.
It seems that real threats do not warrant public concern.
Headline: "Baxter Admits Season Flu Product Contained Live Bird Flu Virus"
The American biotech company Baxter Healthcare Corporation, sent out vaccines that were contaminated with live Avian Flu virus from it's Austrian-based lab to three neighboring countries.
From the article in the Times of India:
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.
Unleash a pandemic? Keep reading.
The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company. The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.
While H5N1 doesn't easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people. That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created.
Newsworthy? You'd think. And there's even a twist:
The contaminated product, which Baxter calls "experimental virus material," was made at the Orth-Donau research facility. Baxter makes its flu vaccine - including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly - at a facility in the Czech Republic.
Yes, Baxter is in the midst of finalizing it's own version of a bird flu vaccine. Here's a recent clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
So just in summary: Here you have a company finalizing a license on a bird flu vaccine that 'accidentally' ships out the exact formula in it's vaccines for creating a potential bird flu pandemic. A flu that would have at least a 60% kill rate among humans.
And according to this interview with a spokesperson at Baxter, all procedures were followed correctly and no one is losing their job. Well, it's good to know everything's just fine.
I'm left with just a few questions:
Where are the journalists on this one? Are there any left in America?