Officials spooked by bird flu mix-up

Public health officials in Europe are taking steps to make sure there's no repeat of a recent incident in which the lethal H5N1 virus was accidentally combined with a seasonal flu virus and shipped to labs in Europe. Officials say that the bird flu virus contaminated batches of H3N2 virus shipped from Baxter's Austrian labs to a customer. That raised the possibility of a viral mutation that could trigger a human pandemic. Baxter, for its part, stressed that the H3N2 virus had been made "replication defective" and that there was little chance of sparking a pandemic. Report