SARS Cases in Asia Show Labs' Risks: As Scientists Battle Diseases, Accidents Can Infect Public By David Brown

The Beijing case is the most mysterious and troubling. There, a 26-year-old graduate student developed SARS in late March, just two weeks after she started working at the virology institute. In mid-April, a 31-year-old man in the same lab also came down with the disease. Neither had been working with the SARS virus.

The graduate student went home to Anhui province, where she infected her mother, who died. The student then became ill enough to be hospitalized and infected a nurse. The nurse, in turn, infected five others -- three relatives, a patient and a relative of that patient -- in a "third generation" of infection.

Or so the Chinese claim. I think they're lying.

The biggest disease outbreak that may have arisen from a laboratory was the mini-pandemic of 'Russian flu' in 1977 and 1978.

Despite its name, that strain of influenza virus appeared in Tientsin, China, in May 1977. It spread around the world, causing mild infection that almost exclusively hit people younger than 20. Millions of people became ill, although overall flu mortality did not increase.

What is curious is that this virus had a genetic fingerprint virtually identical to a strain that had last circulated in 1950. Flu viruses evolve at a fairly predictable rate 'and it is extremely difficult to explain why the . . . strains . . . are so strikingly familiar,' a team of scientists wrote in 1978.

There are two possible explanations. The first is that the 1950 virus was somehow 'genetically frozen' in nature -- possibly in ice or perhaps in some human or animal carrier that has never been discovered. The second is that it escaped from a laboratory in China.

Many scientists think the second is the more probable.

So what was that? An experiment in biological warfare gone wrong?