Vaccine maker's snafu sparks pandemic scare - By Drew Zahn

An Illinois-based vaccine manufacturer is being investigated after an experiment gone very wrong led scientists to discover the company had released a contaminated product feared capable of starting a world-wide avian flu pandemic. The Canadian Press originally reported this story.

By Drew Zahn © 2009 WorldNetDaily An Illinois-based vaccine manufacturer is being investigated after an experiment gone very wrong led scientists to discover the company had released a contaminated product feared capable of starting a world-wide avian flu pandemic. The Canadian Press reports that Baxter International's European research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria, supplied materials contaminated with the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus to a research company that then sent portions to labs in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany. The labs thought they were receiving the less deadly, but more readily communicable, human H3N2 virus. When the Czech facility, however, injected a group of ferrets with the virus, the animals died – something that does not happen with H3N2 – prompting scientists to realize an error. What the scientists were dealing with, in fact, was something far more dangerous. Baxter's Austrian lab had sent a mix of H3N2 seasonal viruses and unlabeled, live H5N1 viruses. H3N2 is highly communicable, but less harmful. H5N1 is less easily transmitted to humans, but often lethal. If both strains, scientists fear, were to incubate in a single subject, a hybrid virus could be birthed capable of both sweeping the globe and killing in its wake. [Continue reading]

digg story ~ Submitted by rjwusa