Sars Research Lab Loses 2,000 Tubes of Killer Virus Fragments

April 15th, 2014

Via: International Business Times:

A prestigious research institute in France said it had lost thousands of tubes of samples of the deadly Sars coronavirus.

A routine inventory check at Paris’ Pasteur Institute revealed that 2,349 tubes containing fragments of the virus responsible for the deaths of 774 people in 2002 were missing, the centre named after French chemist Louis Pasteur said.

The institute was quick to reassure the public and said that the contents of the missing vials had no infectious potential. They contained only part of the virus and had no ability to spread.

“Independent experts referred by health authorities have qualified such potential as ‘non-existing’ according to the available evidence and literature on the survival of the Sars virus,” the institute said.

In 2002 more than 8,000 people were infected by a pandemic of Sars – severe acute respiratory syndrome. The virus spread from China through Hong Kong and on to other countries before it was eventually brought under control.

It is not clear how the tubes disappeared from one of the institute’s safest laboratories. Management were made aware of the loss in January, Le Monde newspaper reported.

For weeks, staff at the institute tried to find the missing vials, general director Christian Bréchot said.

“We’ve looked for those boxes [containing the tubes] everywhere,” Bréchot explained.

“We went thought the lists of all the people who have worked here in the past year and a half, including trainees. We have scrutinised their profile to check if there was any conflict.”

Bréchot said that foul play was “highly improbable” but had not been ruled out.

The tubes were stored in a high-security laboratory dedicated to research into highly infective viruses.

Access to the lab is limited to a restricted number of personnel, who have to go through a disinfection process before they can leave.

Bréchot suggested that the tubes, which were moved from one freezer to another in March 2013, might have been destroyed by a member of staff who forgot to record the procedure.

Sars is an airborne virus, which spreads in a similar way to flu and the common cold.

2 Responses to “Sars Research Lab Loses 2,000 Tubes of Killer Virus Fragments”

  1. tal says:

    THE SARS EPIDEMIC: THE SCIENTISTS; Virus Proves Baffling, Turning Up in Only 40% of a Lab’s Test Cases

    Canada’s main virology laboratory has found the virus for severe acute respiratory syndrome in only 40 percent of probable and suspect cases, a surprisingly low rate that puzzles the laboratory’s scientific director and other health officials.

    Also, for unknown reasons, the portion of recent cases testing positive for the virus is declining, and a number of people who are not suspected of having the disease are testing positive, the director, Dr. Frank Plummer, said.

    Dr. Plummer described his team’s findings as ”weird.” He said they had the potential to weaken the link in Canada between the disease, known as SARS, and a previously unknown member of the coronavirus family that the World Health Organization said last week was the cause of SARS.

    Dr. Plummer stressed in an interview that he was not challenging the W.H.O.’s conclusion. He said he was ”reserving judgment” because it was too early in the course of the investigation of the new disease, first detected only five weeks ago, to be certain about many findings without further study and independent confirmation by other laboratories.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/world/sars-epidemic-scientists-virus-proves-baffling-turning-up-only-40-lab-s-test.html

  2. dale says:

    “A routine inventory check at Paris’ Pasteur Institute revealed that 2,349 tubes containing fragments of the virus responsible for the deaths of 774 people in 2002 were missing…”

    Whoa!!! two thousand test tubes containing fragments of hell. Emergency! Red Alert!

    oh, wait—
    “…might have been destroyed by a member of staff who forgot to record the procedure.”

    Okay, okay, that explains it. Forgot the procedure; could happen to anyone really. Man, that was close.

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