New Delhi: India’s polio-free status could have taken a beating on Thursday when an 18-month-old male baby from Bihar’s Darbhanga district was suspected to have contracted the disease. The ‘news’ sent a chill down the spine of Union health ministry officials, who promptly sent the suspected stool samples for testing to the Enterovirus Research Centre (ERC) in Mumbai and Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta. What really happened that sent the entire ministry into a tizzy? All samples picked up as part of a regular surveillance of polio from Bihar are sent to the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) lab in Lucknow for testing. Officials here raised an alarm saying they weren’t very sure about the sample, and couldn’t confirm it to be polio free. Further investigations revealed that the boy had received all his vaccines. Also, infection by a wild polio virus strain was last reported from Bihar almost two and a half years ago. “The Mumbai lab finally confirmed it isn’t polio. It might have been a case of lab contamination,” an official said. India has not reported any case of polio since 13 January, 2011, with the lone case detected from West Bengal’s Howrah district. If India managed to maintain a zero case status till 2014, it would be declared polio free.