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WHO: Lab testing kits could start epidemic

By wire services
Published April 13, 2005

LONDON - Thousands of scientists were scrambling Tuesday at the urging of global health authorities to destroy vials of a pandemic flu strain sent to labs in 18 countries as part of routine testing.

The rush, urged by the World Health Organization, was sparked by a slim, but real, risk that the samples could spark a global flu epidemic. The vials of virus sent by a U.S. company went to nearly 5,000 labs, mostly in the United States, officials said.

"The risk is relatively low that a lab worker will get sick, but a large number of labs got it and if someone does get infected, the risk of severe illness is high and this virus has shown to be fully transmissible," WHO's influenza chief, Klaus Stohr, told the Associated Press.

It was not immediately clear why the 1957 pandemic strain, which killed between 1-million and 4-million people, was in the proficiency test kits routinely sent to labs.

WASHINGTON - Spreading photographs of Iranian nuclear sites over a lunch table at the Bush ranch in Texas on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel urged President Bush to step up pressure on Iran to give up all elements of its nuclear program, the New York Times reports, quoting unnamed senior U.S. and Israeli officials.

Sharon said that Israeli intelligence showed Iran was near a point of no return, according to the officials. Sharon gave no indication that Israel was preparing to act alone to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. Israeli officials declined to describe the evidence they presented or to say what sources it came from.

ENNEPETAL, Germany - German police commandos slipped into a house where a knife-wielding man was holding four schoolgirls hostage Tuesday, surprising the suspect and taking him into custody while rescuing his captives after a five-hour standoff.

The man inflicted a superficial knife wound on the abdomen of a 16-year-old hostage, whom he held with three 11-year-olds, before he was captured by a police SWAT team that entered the red brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac shortly after 6 p.m., lead investigator Ulrich Kuhne said.

Police earlier said the suspect, identified as a 50-year-old Iranian asylum-seeker who has been in Germany since the 1990s, was injured as he was overpowered, but Kuhne gave no further details. The man apparently wanted to be allowed to bring his children from Iran to Germany.

OTTAWA - Members of the Canadian Parliament on Tuesday voted down an opposition attempt to derail the minority Liberal government's bill to legalize gay marriage.

The New Democratic Party and most Bloc Quebecois MPs joined with a majority of Liberals in voting 164-132 against a motion to block legislation to legalize gay marriage nationally.

BERLIN - The head of the German intelligence agency, in an interview published Tuesday, said Osama bin Laden had been able to elude capture after the American invasion of Afghanistan by paying bribes to the Afghan militias delegated the task of finding him.

"The principal mistake was made already in 2001, when one wanted bin Laden to be apprehended by the Afghan militias in Tora Bora," the intelligence official, August Hanning, said in an interview with the German business newspaper Handelsblatt.

Other officials - including Gen. Tommy Franks, the former commander of American forces in Afghanistan - have acknowledged that Afghan militias who fought on the side of the invasion coalition had allowed leaders of al-Qaida and the Taliban to get away. But Hanning is the most senior intelligence official to suggest that bin Laden was among them.

[Last modified April 13, 2005, 01:31:06]