[PhasmaFelis]

What's baffling me is that no source I've been able to find (in English, anyway) sees fit to mention the cause of this accident beyond blandly citing "human error."

Human Error.

"Well, you know, I was just taking my 12-gallon tank of polio for a walk down by the water treatment plant, and whoops! Butterfingers!"

I just. I don't. How.

[jkimmel]

Usually, the big biotech production plants look a lot like breweries. Giant bioreactors that look like fermentors are hooked up to complex control valves moving fluid from one to the other in the various steps of a complicated process.

My best guess is that a technician accidentally hit the "dump waste" button before the vessel was decontaminated/when it had the wrong solution in it/before the virus was deactivated, etc.

This incident is especially worrisome, but having seen the control boards for one of those giant reactors, I'm not surprised that mistakes are made on occasion.

[XorNot]

It seems odd to me that you'd have a waste dump path in such a place which didn't have a secondary decontamination step in it. Running the water through UV sterilization would be an obvious move, and incredibly cheap considering the danger.

[fnordfnordfnord]

I was surprised to learn a few minutes ago that UV light might not be sufficient to render the virus inert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliovirus#Replication_cycle

>>Drake demonstrated that poliovirus is able to undergo multiplicity reactivation.[23] That is, when polioviruses were irradiated with UV light and allowed to undergo multiple infections of host cells, viable progeny could be formed even at UV doses that inactivated the virus in single infections.

[weaksauce]

Even if it went to waste while being potent it would go to a secondary containment. If the human error was in the secondary containment then I can see it being released. I have worked as a contractor for various pharma companies and know how they operate. Not all of them are all that good at what they do and paying for brand names is better than the generics because of the levels of quality assurance.

It was likely some polio introduced into secondary and they didn't process it correctly in that area.

[bertil]

I have no information about this case other than the source. However, most human errors like this one are due to unexpected similitude and shared affordances: two things that should not be mixed have the same size, shape, color.

There was a case of a nurse who injected the wrong compound in a baby and killed it a decade ago (in a military hospital in France, one with a stellar reputation): two viles were strikingly similar (one containing vaccine, the other Potassium) even after being told what those were, you would confuse them.

In this case, I'm assuming concentrated virus is not meant to be near water release, therefore no one noticed until yesterday that there were stored in vats that look like possibly fat-digesting bacteria, or chlorine. 40L is a large quantity: the only container I can think of for those is either a metallic oil drum, or that omnipresent industrial blue plastic barrel (the one you see in that infamous scene in Breaking Bad).

[roma1n]

Plus a trainee nurse inadvertently killed a patient in France two weeks ago through direct KCl injection. There is now a move to remove all KCl vials and replace them with pre-diluted pouches.

[ekianjo]

Yeah, you'd think they have strict procedures for release of live virus in the environment.

[nickodell]

Maybe someone was told to get rid of the polio virus, and poured it down the drain.