Ferreting Out A Problem In the Laboratory
PLEASE SEE March 17th Update of this story. Some of the Original newspaper accounts were wrong.
A Few More Details On The Baxter Mishap
# 2804
In what could have been a major incident, we are just now learning about a mix-up with experimental vaccines being tested at a laboratory in the Czech Republic.
According to early news reports an experimental (presumably seasonal flu) vaccine was contaminated at the factory with the H5N1 virus and sent off to a laboratory for testing on ferrets.
Some of the ferrets died, which set off alarm bells.
Surviving ferrets were culled and employees of the lab were immediately placed on Tamiflu.
Luckily none were reported to have been infected by the virus.
This report from DPA.
Austrian firm sent deadly vaccine for testing in Czech Republic
Posted : Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:18:01 GMT
Author : DPA
Prague - An Austrian pharmaceutical firm sent a flu vaccine, which it had accidentally contaminated with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, for testing in the Czech Republic, a report said Tuesday. The Austrian firm Baxter said it contaminated the vaccine with the dangerous virus by accident, likely during packaging in Austria, the Mlada Fronta Dnes daily reported, citing Baxter's representative.
Baxter shipped the infected vaccine to the Czech biomedical firm Biotest for testing on ferrets in late January.
None of Biotest's 13 employees, who had been exposed to the highly pathogenic virus for a week, contracted the disease.
According to the World Health Organization figures, the bird flu has killed 254 people, mostly in Asia and Africa, including four deaths reported in Turkey.
The Czech Republic's chief epidemiologist Michael Vit said that it was unclear whether the Biotest workers had been under a high risk of infection as the Czech authorities did not know how much virus the vaccine contained.
Officials, however, hinted that the situation could have been serious. "Thank God it did not spread," Vit said.
The Czech company managed to prevent the virus from spreading outside the lab to poultry breeds, which would have had to be culled in such an event.
"If it were to spread to poultry farms it would have caused serious problems," said Josef Duben, a spokesman for the Czech State Veterinary Administration.
The exposed employees were given Tamiflu medicine and have been regularly tested, Vit said.
The infected ferrets had to be culled and the laboratory, which is located 70 kilometres east of the Czech capital Prague, was disinfected.
A close call, and the second high profile story coming out of eastern Europe regarding lax, and potentially dangerous H5N1 studies. Last summer we learned of this debacle in Poland.
Homeless people die after bid flu vaccine trial in Poland
By Matthew Day in Warsaw
Last Updated: 5:19PM BST 02/07/2008
Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after a number of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus.
The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus.
Authorities claim that the alleged victims received £1-2 to be tested with what they thought was a conventional flu vaccine but, according to investigators, was actually an anti bird-flu drug.
The director of a Grudziadz homeless centre, Mieczyslaw Waclawski, told a Polish newspaper that last year, 21 people from his centre died, a figure well above the average of about eight.
Although authorities have yet to prove a direct link between the deaths and the activities of the medical staff, Poland's health minister, Ewa Kopacz, has said that the doctors and nurses involved should not return to their profession.
One has to wonder just how often laboratory work like this gets shipped off to countries where safety standards and oversight are presumably less rigorous.
