[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.