Perspective On Flu Alarm

The rush to destroy samples of a deadly flu virus distributed to thousands of labs around the world is certainly justified, says The Early Show medical correspondent Dr. Emily Senay. But she stresses the concern stems from only a "theoretical risk."

"I think they've actually been out there since October in many cases," Senay tells co-anchor Rene Syler. "I think this is a theoretical risk. There is no outbreak at the moment.

"The concern is that it would escape from one of these laboratories, possibly infect one of the workers, and go from there. But this has not happened yet, and these laboratories, most of them, virtually all of them, are accustomed to working with virulent pathogens.

"So this is something they need to be concerned about. This was clearly a mistake, but this is a theoretical concern at the moment."

Senay explains that the virus was inadvertently included in a kit designed to test the labs' ability to identify flu strains.

The one over which there's so much alarm was responsible for a worldwide pandemic in 1957 and 1958 that killed up to 4 million people, 70,000 of them in the United States.

"People haven't seen this flu strain since '68," Senay points out. "That was the last year it was included in the vaccine. So we have a non-immune population. If this were to get out, it would be very serious."

She doubts any sinister motives: "From what I can find so far, this appears right now to have been a clerical error. A boo-boo."