Why scientists are concerned about leaks at biolabs
30 May, 2021
The theory that COVID-19 could possibly be the result of scientific experiments has thrown a spotlight on the work of the world's soundest biolabs.
While the facts linking SARS-CoV-2 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China is strictly circumstantial, several professionals want tougher controls on such facilities over fears that accidental leaks could touch off another pandemic.
Here's what you need to understand:
59 TOP FACILITIES
The Wuhan lab is one of the soundest class, commonly referred to as biosafety level 4 or BSL4.
These are created to job safely and securely with dangerous bacteria and viruses that may cause serious diseases for which there are no known treatment or vaccines.
"There will be HVAC filtration systems, so that the virus can't get away through exhaust; any waste products drinking water that leaves the center is cared for with either chemicals or high temperature ranges to make sure that there surely is nothing alive," Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate System at George Mason University, told AFP.
The researchers themselves are highly trained and wear hazmat matches.
There are 59 such facilities around the world, according to a written report Koblentz co-authored that was released this week.
"There are zero binding international specifications for safe, secure, and responsible focus on pathogens," the report, called Mapping Maximum Biological Containment Labs Globally, said.
ACCIDENTS DO HAPPEN
Accidents can happen, sometimes at the top tier facilities, and much more frequently in lower rung labs of which there are thousands.
Individual H1N1 virus - the same flu that caused the 1918 pandemic - leaked in 1977 on the Soviet Union and China and pass on worldwide.
In 2001, a mentally disturbed employee at a US biolab mailed away anthrax spores across the country, killing five people.
Two Chinese researchers subjected to SARS in 2004 pass on the disease to other folks, killing one.
In 2014, a handful of smallpox vials were uncovered during an Foodstuff and Medication Administration office move.
Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Hands Control and Non-Proliferation, has been sounding the alarm for quite some time about the general public safety threats posed by such facilities.
"Human mistakes constitute over 70 per cent of the errors in laboratories," he told AFP, adding that US researchers need to rely on data from Flexibility of Data requests to learn of these incidents.
"GAIN OF FUNCTION" CONTROVERSY
There is disagreement between the US federal government, which funded bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, plus some independent scientists, about whether this work was controversial "gain of function" (GOF) research.
GOF research entails modifying pathogens to create them more transmissible, deadlier, or better in a position to evade treatment and vaccines - all to discover how to fight them better.
This field has long been contentious. Debate reached a fever pitch when two research teams in 2011 demonstrated they could make bird flu transmissible between mammals.
Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told AFP he was first concerned "that it could create a strain of virus that if it infected a laboratory employee could not just kill that laboratory employee ... but also result in a pandemic".
"The exploration is not required and does not contribute to the production of drugs or vaccines," added molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, among the staunchest opponents of the kind of research.
In 2014 the US government announced a pause in federal government funding for such work, which gave way in 2017 to a framework that would consider each application on a case-by-case basis.
But the task has been criticized as lacking transparency and credibility.
As late as last year, a nonprofit received financing from the US on research to "predict spillover potential" of bat coronavirus to individuals in Wuhan.
Questioned by Congress this kind of week, Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of the Nationwide Institutes of Wellbeing denied this kind of amounted to get of function research, but Ebright said it evidently does.
THE PATH AHEAD
None of this signifies that COVID-19 definitely leaked from a lab - actually there is no hard scientific proof in favor of natural origin or lab accident situation, said Ebright.
But there are certain lines of circumstantial facts and only the latter. For instance, Wuhan is around 1,000 kilometers north of bat caves that harbor the ancestor virus, well out from the animals' flight range.
Researchers from Wuhan were however regarded as carrying out routine excursions to those caves to take on samples.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist from the Broad Institute, said there have been no indications of risky pathogen research dying down found in the wake of the pandemic - actually "it's possibly expanded".
Last year, Chan published research showing that, contrary to SARS, SARS-CoV-2 had not been evolving fast when it had been first detected in humans - another little bit of circumstantial evidence that could indicate lab origin.
Chan considers herself a "fence-sitter" on the competing hypotheses, but will not favor banning risky research, fearing it could then go underground.
One solution "could just be as simple as moving these analysis institutes out into extremely remote areas ... where you have to quarantine for 14 days before we re-enter in human society", she said.
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