"Deadly influenza virus shipments missing!"

There is a story going around about a pandemic strain of flu virus being sent around the world. The story became even more frantic when those sent to Mexico and Lebanon turned up missing: CTV.ca link.

Since it's early in the morning here, I decided to come up with a fun conspiracy theory on this (specifically, why they didn't just say "this shipment is contaminated and unusable, please dispose of it" rather than "run for your lives, this is a killer pandemic in a bottle!").

Perhaps different harmless "tracker" viruses were sent to various labs with this particular cover story. A terrorist group sees the headlines and grabs the "killer virus." Once it is released, it can be traced back to the lab and a terrorist cell can be shut down before they release something really nasty.

Okay, so it's not the most exciting conspiracy, at least it's more clever than claiming the jets on 9/11 were radio-controlled.