TOIn biological research facilities in the United States and around the world, hundreds of security breaches occur each year in laboratories that experiment with dangerous pathogens. Scientists and other laboratory workers are bitten by infected animals, pricked with contaminated needles, and splashed with infectious fluids. They are at risk of exposure when their protective equipment malfunctions or critical building biosecurity systems fail.
And, like all humans, people who work in laboratories make mistakes and sometimes take shortcuts or ignore safety procedures, even when working with pathogens that have the potential to cause a global pandemic.
However, the public rarely learns of these incidents, which tend to be shrouded in secrecy by the laboratories and government officials whose agencies often fund and oversee the research. my new book, Pandora’s Bet: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Riskreveals how these and other types of laboratory accidents have occurred with alarming frequency and how the lack of strict, mandatory and transparent biosafety oversight and incident reporting is putting us all at risk.
The book provides numerous case studies of near misses, infections and outbreaks caused by a lack of safety in some of the best laboratories in the world and shows the extraordinary efforts that have been put into minimizing the significance of safety breaches and keeping accidents in secret. This secrecy extends not only to the general public, but also to the government agencies we all trust to prevent disaster when things go wrong at these facilities.
For example, when a security breach it happened in 2019 in a University of Wisconsin-Madison laboratory experimenting with a dangerous and highly controversial laboratory-created H5N1 avian influenza virus, the university never told the public, nor state and local public health officials. The university made the decision to end the quarantine of a potentially exposed lab worker without consulting Wisconsin public health officials, despite performances dating back years that these health departments would be notified of “any potential exposures” during this especially risky type of research.
In another incident, a pipe burst in a laboratory waste storage tank in 2018 at a US Army research facility at Fort Detrick, near Washington DC. The workers initially ruled out that any security breach had occurred. Army officials then belatedly issued public statements that omitted key details and created the misleading impression that no dangerous pathogens could have left the base. However, my reporting has uncovered government documents and even a photo showing the giant tank spewing an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of unsterilized laboratory wastewater near an open storm drain that empties into a popular public waterway.
It has been a shocking revelation for people who live in Frederick, Maryland, including some who were part of a citizens’ committee on the public safety of the Fort Detrick labs. “We didn’t know about the extent of the sewage breach…or the utter paucity and inadequate environmental sampling that underlay the Army’s ‘no risk to community’ assessment until Alison Young’s (report),” former president of the committee, Matt Sharkey. , biologist, recently said the local newspaper.
Most of the time, when accidents happen, the labs are lucky and no one gets sick. Many pathogens are not easily transmitted from person to person, and it is the people who work within laboratory facilities who are most at risk of infection. But some viruses and bacteria are capable of causing outbreaks if released into the surrounding community and beyond. Of greatest concern are pathogens that have the potential to cause pandemics, especially certain types of influenza viruses and coronaviruses.
When will our luck run out?
Laboratory safety regulation in the US and around the world is fragmented and often relies heavily on scientific institutions policing themselves. There is no complete tracking of which laboratories have collections of the most dangerous viruses, bacteria and toxins. And no one seems to know how many facilities are manipulating pathogens in ways that make them more dangerous than those found in nature, a controversial and risky category of experiments sometimes referred to as gain-of-function research.
The world Health The organization “does not have access to that information about who is doing what in terms of gain-of-function (GOF) or similar high-risk research work,” Kazunobu Kojima, a WHO biosafety expert, told me.
Concerns that the Covid-19 pandemic may have been caused by a research-related accident in Wuhan, China, have raised public awareness in recent years about how lax security in biological research can pose a threat to the public health. However, this is not a new topic.
For decades, as high-containment biolabs have proliferated around the world, policymakers and scientific experts have worriedly discussed the growing risk of a laboratory accident leading to a catastrophic outbreak. Before Covid and before Washington politics became so toxic, Republicans and Democrats in Congress held multiple bipartisan hearings examining the threats posed by laboratory accidents and jointly requested studies on biosafety and biosecurity issues from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO).
“Many experts agree that as the number of high-containment laboratories increases…the overall risk of an accidental or deliberate release of a dangerous pathogen will also increase,” GAO’s Nancy Kingsbury. testified at a hearing in 2014, noting that the GAO had been issuing findings and recommendations on fragmented oversight of the lab since 2009.
Yet despite the passage of so many years, little has been done to fix the current fragmented oversight that often shields security lapses in laboratories, and the government agencies that oversee them, from public accountability. And now, the Covid-19 pandemic has sparked a new global boom in biolab construction, with even more labs planned or under construction, often in countries where a recent report found that government stability and national biorisk management were lacking.
because of china rejection to allow for independent forensic investigation into the natural or laboratory origin of Covid-19, we may never know the source of the coronavirus that has killed millions of people around the world. But it’s not too late to take action to address gaps in biosafety and biosafety oversight and transparency in the US and around the world, and reduce the chance that a laboratory accident will cause a future pandemic.
