imagine if a terrorist intercepted one of those shipments?

i hate it when newspaper reporter leave me hanging with a ton of questions.  like just how is it that we can have these types of mistakes in the first place.  at the end of the piece, they had a chance to answer that, but this reporter didn't seem fit enough to question any other meridien employee.

 

A dangerous strain of the flu virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 1957 was sent to thousands of laboratories in the United States and around the world, triggering a frantic effort to destroy the samples to prevent an outbreak, health officials revealed yesterday.

 

then some 10 paragraphs later:

 

The problem arose when a private company, Meridian Bioscience Inc. of Cincinnati, sent a panel of virus samples to about 3,700 laboratories, some in doctors' offices, to be tested as part of routine quality-control certification conducted by the College of American Pathologists. An additional 2,750 laboratories, all in the United States, received the samples as part of other certification processes and were asked to destroy them, CDC spokesman Dan Rutz said.

...

 

The mistake came to light March 25 when the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, identified the virus. "They were doing this routine testing and identified this virus and said, 'This shouldn't be here,' " Rutz said. Canadian officials notified WHO and the CDC on Friday.
..
Robert G. Webster, a flu expert at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, called the incident "a terrible, terrible mistake."

 

"I have been telling WHO for a number of years that this is a dangerous virus that is still out there in more labs than they know," he said. "This may alert WHO and Homeland Security and whoever wants to know that each and every H2N2 sample from 1957 needs to be rounded up and locked down."

 

"For reasons I don't understand and Meridian doesn't understand, the documentation they had was incorrect," he said, adding that the source of the mislabeling was unclear.

 

Schwartz said a mechanism is being established to require anyone shipping pathogens to notify the CDC about what strains of virus are involved.

 

"is" being established?  why isn't it already established???

 

William J. Motto, chairman and chief executive of Meridian Bioscience, said he had no comment last night.

well, DUH.  what's he gonna say?
our company is unprofessional?