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Comment by robbiet480 | Hacker News Reader

Scary to put it lightly. You'd think that we would be more careful with such things. I could only imagine who actually found the sample, and if they even realized what it was without Googling. An even worse thought would be if they were to just throw it in the trash.

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I'm pretty sure anyone that speaks a Romance language may recognize 'variola' as smallpox. I guess the original label used the Latin name. Also, in a CDC laboratory, I'd bet dollars vs pennies there's already a protocol for handling "old badly labelled samples" that includes "not opening" and "not misplacing".

yeah i don't think you throw random stuff in the trash, i'm sure they go into a bio hazard disposal.

It began at the FDA, which doesn't routinely handle substances of this type. That's why it was transferred to NIH in Bethesda temporarily while the CDC team came up from Atlanta.

Well, no, it began at the NIH. NIH handed the labs over to the FDA, and apparently missed a vial during the move.

Ahh. Yet still, it was not found at CDC by CDC employees more likely to be trained to handle highly infectious samples.

> I'm pretty sure anyone that speaks a Romance language may recognize 'variola' as smallpox.

Wait, what? Are you limiting that to people who work in an area where they might possibly come into contact with it? Because otherwise you might find it fun to ask the next hundred people you meet what "variola" is.

You realize English is not a Romance language?

In general, when you come across any sample that's not yours or something whose label you can't read or don't recognize, you don't touch it at all until you can find someone who does. If you can't find anybody, you handle that sample as if it contains poison - even if it's just a long-dead colony.

I assume that the CDC/FDA/NIH have more stringent protocol in place.

Meanwhile:

OFFICIALS at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently discovered that at least 75 workers there had been exposed to possible anthrax infection.

and

Based on current reports, the problem arose when anthrax — incorrectly thought to be dead — was removed from the high-containment lab and exposed people who had no knowledge that they were in contact with live bacteria.

from

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/opinion/anthrax-thats-not-...

Yeah, I read that. Just like in all disasters, the biggest contributor to catastrophic failure is human error. I'm sure the protocols were in place to prevent something like this from happening.

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