[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.