Dead Birds in Texas and Pandemic Bird Flu Cover Up

The Bird Flu Lab Accident that Officially Didn't Happen, or How the University of Texas at Austin Could Have Caused the Next Influenza Pandemic, but Everybody Lived to Cover It Up

Don't ask the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about the genetically engineered influenza pandemic that might have started in Austin, Texas in April 2006. That's because until NIH reads this Biosafety Bites, they almost certainly haven't heard anything about it. And that shows yet again that the US biotechnology and laboratory safety oversight system is a dangerous failure.

NIH's Office of Biotechnology Activities (OBA) doesn't enforce biosafety rules, so the University of Texas (UT) didn't report the unsettling Bird Flu accident. UT must have reasoned: Why draw attention to a lab accident when there's no cost for burying such incidents? It surely wouldn't be the first time such an event has been swept under the rug.

BSL-3 in the Heart of Texas
According UT records obtained by the Sunshine Project, the accident happened on a Wednesday afternoon, 12 April 2006. A postdoc was working in the Molecular Biology Building ("MBB") on the University of Texas campus in Austin, just a couple minutes' walk away from tightly packed dormitories, the kind of place where a virulent new influenza strain might eagerly take hold. A little over a kilometer south is the Texas Capitol and a warren of state office buildings teeming with public employees.

Centrifuge Accident Aerosolizes Genetically Engineered Influenza
The postdoc was working alone in a beefed-up BSL-3 laboratory wearing a full lab suit. A respirator system provided oxygen through an air hose. The high-tech safety measures were in place because the viruses in the lab were not your average flu. They were something much more dangerous. They were genetically engineered influenza strains that mixed and matched genes of the common human H3N2 influenza and those of deadly H5N1 "Bird Flu". The kind of unpredictable reassorted flu strain that public health officials fear could cause the next human pandemic.

In the BSL-3 lab, a quantity of the engineered influenza was ready for work. It had been grown mixed with cells. The experiments required purified virus. So, a little after 2:00PM, the researcher transferred a quantity of the virus mixture into a tube. The tube was capped and placed in a centrifuge on a lab bench. The centrifuge would separate out the virus through spinning - centrifugal force.

But the tube was of the wrong type for the centrifuge. There were two almost identical centrifuges in the lab, and their non-interchangeable parts had become mixed up.

The postdoc pushed a button and the centrifuge began to spin. Because the tube was the wrong type, its cap didn't fit correctly. It cracked. The centrifuge lost balance. Turning the machine off and then opening it, the postdoc observed that the level of virus fluid in the tube had gone down and that its exterior had become wet, both indicators of a leak. This was a serious problem because as the machine spun around, the leaked virus had become aerosolized, at least within the centrifuge.

The Inevitable Human Error
By now the cracked cap problem had been compounded by human error, an ever-present factor in lab work. Rather than waiting for the aerosolized flu to settle, the centrifuge had been immediately opened. In an invisible puff of air, virus particles wafted out of the machine. Now, the virus was floating around the whole lab, stirred by air movements, then slowing settling on exposed surfaces or being sucked out the exhaust which, hopefully, had effective HEPA filtration (the UT documents are silent on this item).

It was something like a Bird Flu victim walking into the room and coughing all around, spreading virus where he went. Except this mixed up lab creation of H5N1 virus was possibly more efficient at infecting humans than natural "Bird Flu" because of its H3N2 human influenza parts.