In 1957, there was the last Asian flu pandemic. Between 1 million and 4 million people are thought to have died from the virus.
In October 2004, an American lab sent samples of the deadly Asian flu strain that had been stored to other labs around the world. Because of a mistake in the office, 3,700 samples of the Asian flu virus from 1957 were sent to labs all over the world. The US tried hard to fix this terrible mistake, but because the labs had expected to get a much more normal sample of flu virus to test, they did not treat the sample with the care that the strain they got needed. It's not likely that all of the samples were brought back.
What could have caused this to happen?
From time to time, the College of American Pathologists sends different viruses to labs all over the world. They do this so that these labs can test their vaccines to see how well they work against the expected flu strains. So that the tests are accurate, the labs don't know what strain of the virus they will get. The CAP is the only one who knows what they send to the testing labs. The College of American Pathologists thought they were sending out a normal Influenza A virus, but instead they sent out the Asian flu, which has killed more people than any other virus in history.
If this Asian flu had spread to the rest of the world, it would have caused a lot of trouble. No one born after 1968 would be immune to the virus, and the effects would probably be at least as bad as they were in 1957, when people had had time to build up some immunity from the virus's ancestors.
An administrative mistake led to the problem, but the specifics haven't been made public yet. How could 3,700 Asian flu samples get out into the world by mistake? Samples were sent to North and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. It would have only taken one accident or a mistake in how the samples were thrown away for the genie to get out of the bottle.
The scariest thing about the situation was that the labs that got the samples did not take the care they should have because they did not know enough. The Asian flu should be kept under very tight control. The kits don't get a lot of security because they usually contain a strain of flu that isn't too dangerous.
This event helps put the current scare about the bird flu into perspective. The avian flu, or H5N1, doesn't spread from person to person. It only goes from birds to people or other animals. So, it makes sense to worry about bird flu, but the real danger comes from mistakes like the one made in October 2004 when a deadly infectious disease was handled carelessly. This kind of mistake can happen at any time, and the results would be terrible. Bird flu is not likely to spread to other animals, and vaccines to protect people from the H5N1 flu virus are almost ready.
