GENEVA - Samples of a deadly flu virus that were mistakenly sent around the world by a US laboratory are still unaccounted for in at least two instances in Lebanon and South Korea, the UN World Health Organisation said Tuesday, amid confusion in the US-led tracing operation.
"Of the 19 countries which received the panels (samples), ministries of health of 18 of them have informed us that laboratories have either destroyed the panels or never received them," the WHO's top flu expert, Klaus Stohr, said.
The United States was the only country on Tuesday that still had to formally complete a massive operation to track down and destroy the samples sent to about 4,500 laboratories.
However, Stohr revealed that last-minute hitches had emerged with tracking some shipments, amid confusion between testing agencies, laboratories, packers and private shippers.
Laboratories in 19 countries had received the samples containing H2N2 "Asian" flu from the College of American Pathologists (CAP), sparking a global alert this month and a scramble to find the lab testing kits.
Ninety percent of the laboratories that received the samples since October 2004 were in North America, and 98 percent of them have reported destroying the consignments, according to information form US health authorities.
The H2N2 strain is similar to the 1957 flu virus that killed up to four million people across the world in the late 1950s, and should not have been sent out in routine test kits for pathogens, according to the WHO.
In South Korea, three of the six laboratories involved said they had not received samples in one 2004 shipment, although the shippers said they had signatures confirming their delivery, Stoehr said.
Further confusion was emerging in Lebanon, where a sample thought to have been tracked down earlier this week was now thought to be in the hands of a second shipper in the country, and its destruction could not be confirmed.
"Nobody can put their hands on the samples, however the area in which they could be is relatively narrow," Stohr told journalists.
The WHO official indicated that during the search over the past ten days the agency had received a wealth of confusing information from the CAP and different parties involved in the incident.
"The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is playing a much stronger coordinating role in the US now," Stoehr said, adding that he hoped "they will go to the bottom of the problem".
"We believe that in the next hours or days the matter will be resolved," he told journalists.
Some 3,747 laboratories were on the CAP's shipping list, but the probe was widened to cover another 800 laboratories in the United States which may have receive H2N2 through other companies.
04/19/2005 13:51 GMT