SARS virus, contained in thousands of vials, has gone missing from the high-security laboratory Pasteur Institute in France.
SARS is a contagious and severe respiratory illness first identified in China in November 2002. It killed 775 people and infected some 8,000 at the time, but there have been no known outbreaks since 2004.
Now 2,349 vials with samples of the potentially lethal virus are reported to be missing.
The research body insists there is no cause for alarm as the samples have “no infectious potential”, but it has filed a legal complaint against “persons unknown” in an attempt to resolve the mysterious disappearance.
An inventory conducted at the Institute in January could not account for the disappearance after which the country’s drug and safety agency was called in. That body conducted a “in depth” investigation over four days, but have not found the vials.
They had been stored in boxes in a refrigerator under high security. Although they “looked for the boxes everywhere”, the institute’s director discounted as “highly unlikely” the idea that they could have been stolen for malevolent purposes because only a handful of staff are authorised to enter the laboratory and the most dangerous tubes are cryptically labelled so as to be unintelligible to outsiders.
Moreover, anyone leaving the laboratory must pass through a disinfection zone, which would have killed any virus.
Experts said the risk of infection from the missing vials was “nil” as they only contained harmless, incomplete parts of the virus, even if these come into contact with humans or are inhaled.
The institute said a possible explanation could be that all the tubes were “inadvertently destroyed” during transfer to another refrigerator in 2012 when the original refrigerator malfunctioned.
