Mary Wilson
Well-known member
As biology gets better, biosecurity gets harder. Here’s what the world can do to prepare.
Apr 5, 2022, 6:00am EDT
By Kelsey Piper
... our ability to engineer viruses has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, thanks in part to the rapidly falling price of DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis technologies. Those advances have opened the doorto innovations in medicine, but theyalso present a challenge: Viruses as deadly and disruptive as Covid-19, or potentially much worse, are going to be possible to produce in labs worldwide soon, if not right now.
To prevent pandemics that could be far worse than Covid-19, the world has to dramatically change our approach to managing global biological risks. “Amateur biologists can now accomplish feats that would have been impossible until recently for even the foremost experts in top-of-the-line laboratories,” argued Barry Pavel, a national security policy director at the Atlantic Council, and Atlantic Council co-author Vikram Venkatram.
... Covid-19 was a warning shot forhow fast a pandemic disease can spread around the world, and how ill-equipped we are to protect ourselves from a truly killer virus. If the world takes that warning shot seriously, we caninsulate ourselves against the next pandemic, be it naturally occurring or human-made. With the right steps, we could even make ourselves “highly resistant if not immune to human-targeted biological threats,” MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt told me.
... Whatever chain of events caused Covid-19, we already know that infectious disease outbreaks can originate in a lab. In 1978, a year after the final reported cases of smallpox in the wild, a lab leak caused an outbreak in the UK. Photographer Janet Parker died, while her mother got a mild case and recovered; more than 500 people who’d been exposed were vaccinated. (Smallpox vaccination can protect against smallpox even after an exposure.) Only that quick, large-scale response prevented what could have been a full-blown recurrence of the once-extinct disease.
... In March 2014, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researcher in Atlantaaccidentally contaminated a vial of a fairly harmless bird flu with a far deadlier strain. The contaminated virus was then shipped to at least two different agricultural labs. One noticed the mistake when their chickens sickened and died, while the other was not notified for more than a month.
The mistake was communicated to CDC leadership only when the CDC conducted an extensive investigation in the aftermath of a different mistake — the potential exposure of 75 federal employees to live anthrax, after a lab that was supposed to inactivate the anthrax samples accidentally prepared activated ones.
After SARS emerged in 2003, there were six separate incidents of SARS infections resulting from lab leaks. ...
https://www.vox.com/22937531/virus-lab-safety-pandemic-prevention
Apr 5, 2022, 6:00am EDT
By Kelsey Piper
... our ability to engineer viruses has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, thanks in part to the rapidly falling price of DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis technologies. Those advances have opened the doorto innovations in medicine, but theyalso present a challenge: Viruses as deadly and disruptive as Covid-19, or potentially much worse, are going to be possible to produce in labs worldwide soon, if not right now.
To prevent pandemics that could be far worse than Covid-19, the world has to dramatically change our approach to managing global biological risks. “Amateur biologists can now accomplish feats that would have been impossible until recently for even the foremost experts in top-of-the-line laboratories,” argued Barry Pavel, a national security policy director at the Atlantic Council, and Atlantic Council co-author Vikram Venkatram.
... Covid-19 was a warning shot forhow fast a pandemic disease can spread around the world, and how ill-equipped we are to protect ourselves from a truly killer virus. If the world takes that warning shot seriously, we caninsulate ourselves against the next pandemic, be it naturally occurring or human-made. With the right steps, we could even make ourselves “highly resistant if not immune to human-targeted biological threats,” MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt told me.
... Whatever chain of events caused Covid-19, we already know that infectious disease outbreaks can originate in a lab. In 1978, a year after the final reported cases of smallpox in the wild, a lab leak caused an outbreak in the UK. Photographer Janet Parker died, while her mother got a mild case and recovered; more than 500 people who’d been exposed were vaccinated. (Smallpox vaccination can protect against smallpox even after an exposure.) Only that quick, large-scale response prevented what could have been a full-blown recurrence of the once-extinct disease.
... In March 2014, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researcher in Atlantaaccidentally contaminated a vial of a fairly harmless bird flu with a far deadlier strain. The contaminated virus was then shipped to at least two different agricultural labs. One noticed the mistake when their chickens sickened and died, while the other was not notified for more than a month.
The mistake was communicated to CDC leadership only when the CDC conducted an extensive investigation in the aftermath of a different mistake — the potential exposure of 75 federal employees to live anthrax, after a lab that was supposed to inactivate the anthrax samples accidentally prepared activated ones.
After SARS emerged in 2003, there were six separate incidents of SARS infections resulting from lab leaks. ...
https://www.vox.com/22937531/virus-lab-safety-pandemic-prevention