A French laboratory has been forced to close after apparently losing up to 2,000 test tubes containing the SARS virus.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is a highly contagious respiratory illness which infected 8,000 people in 2003 and killed nearly 800.
It originated in the Guangdong province of southern China in 2002 and has since been brought under control - though fears of a wider outbreak persist.
That fear won't be helped by the news from France, where the prestigious Pasteur Institute has been suspended by authorities for letting thousands of samples apparently go missing.
The Institute reported the tubes missing from its lab in April, though it said there isn't any risk of infection. It then asked the ANSM agency to look into the problem, who said Tuesday that there was evident "dysfunction" in how the lab tracks these types of samples.
As a result the lab has been suspended and will carry out a "tube by tube" audit of its material, according to the AP.
Meanwhile every B-movie and video game producer in the world just got a freebie intro for their next terrifying apocalypse adventure.