Goes to the College of American Pathologists for shipping out 3,700 samples of this lovely item:
The samples are of Asian flu, which killed between one and four million people in 1957 but disappeared by 1968. Testing kits containing the virus were sent to more than 3,700 laboratories in 18 countries from Brazil to Lebanon.
Because the virus has not been in circulation since 1968, people born after that do not have antibodies against it – and current vaccines do not guard against it.
I’m not entirely sure why the story pays so much attention to the 61 sample shipped outside North America, seeing as how a) it’s the BBC reporting, and b) last time I heard, our most recent spate of bioterrorism was home-grown. We think.