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Flu virus debacle sheds light on archaic shipping system

Every day, deadly germs are shipped across the country and around the globe, right alongside the books, gourmet foods and birthday presents sent through FedEx Corp. and similar couriers.

Often their journeys can be circuitous, too.

Follow, for instance, a single vial of the potentially deadly flu virus causing a world health scare because it was included in test kits sent to more than 4,000 laboratories. It was grown in a Virginia lab, spent time in a Cincinnati freezer and passed through a small medical company on the Mexican border before it arrived at a Milwaukee lab.

Health experts, government officials and the couriers say that the transport of these germs is tightly regulated and that the samples are heavily packaged and labeled to ensure safety. A catastrophic outbreak has never occurred as a result of such shipments.

"The safety level of the transport of biological material is incredibly high," said Dr. Jared Schwartz, a microbiologist and officer with the College of American Pathologists, which is in charge of the flu testing program. "I have no concerns about the safety of the transport."

But accidents do occur: Just last month, a FedEx truck carrying five boxes of samples of anthrax, flu, tuberculosis, salmonella and E. coli collided with a car in Winnipeg. None of the dangerous germs escaped.

"This has been a big concern for us," said Sujatha Byravan of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a Boston nonprofit fighting the U.S. expansion of high-containment labs that will be home to the world's deadliest germs.

At least 18 such "hot labs" are being planned or built in the United States in the coming years, and a growing number of scientists are being trained in the darker aspects of microbiology as part of a federal effort to combat bioterrorism.

"The more FedEx exchanges of biological material you have between labs, the more opportunities there are for accidents," Byravan said.

The thousands of deadly flu samples that labs were hastily destroying at the urging of global health officials originated at American Type Culture Collection, according to the college of pathologists. ATCC is a nonprofit laboratory in Manassas, Va., that ships many of the nation's flu viruses and other germs to labs everywhere.

ATCC was created in 1925 by a group of scientists who wanted a central location for the nation's supply of germs for laboratory use. It ships 150,000 biological items annually, making revenues of $32-million, according to its latest publicly available tax return.

In the days since some concerned Canadian scientists alerted the World Health Organization that their test kit included a flu strain responsible for killing between 1-million and 4-million people in 1957, blame is being placed on Meridian Bioscience Inc. of Cincinnati for shipping thousands of vials of the dangerous bug around the world.

In fact, most of the Cincinnati company's test kits with the 1957 bug were ultimately assembled and shipped via FedEx and DHL by Proficiency Testing Service, a tiny Meridian subcontractor in Brownsville, Texas.

FedEx said its employees are "rigorously trained" to handle dangerous biological material and federal laws and company policy mandate packages be clearly labeled and properly packaged.

"The packages are handled differently. ... We have to protect our employees, too," said FedEx spokeswoman Lourdes Pena. Asked for more details, she conceded that dangerous biological material is shipped alongside other packages - only more carefully.

[Last modified April 15, 2005, 00:50:05]