What Happens If An Engineered Virus Escapes A Lab?

Here’s how things have been progressing:

The days of Anthrax et al. are (mostly) over

Biosecurity experts are becoming increasingly concerned about dangerous laboratory leaks, particularly those involving pathogens engineered* to cause pandemics. Things like Anthrax are thus no longer their primary concern.

A controversial subfield involves engineering enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs), typically variants of already-dangerous viruses that have been modified to become more transmissible or deadly. If one escaped a laboratory, the consequences could include a global pandemic.

*You may be wondering: is there any justification for doing this aside from developing bioweapons?

And the answer is: arguably, but it’s not without its problems.

Virologists argue that engineering dangerous pathogens could help scientists prepare for future pandemics, accelerate treatments, and save lives:

• In the early 2010s, researchers created a deadly bird flu strain capable of airborne transmission between mammals, with the intention of providing insights into worst-case pandemic scenarios.
• Then in 2014, a CDC scientist unknowingly contaminated a relatively harmless bird flu sample with a deadly lab-grown variant and shipped it to the USDA.

There are, of course, safeguards! High-containment labs use sophisticated protections, including air-decontaminating ventilation systems, airtight biohazard suits with their own dedicated oxygen supplu, and sometimes buildings nested inside one another to prevent unnatural disasters from breaching containment.

However, advanced containment systems are expensive to build and maintain. The good news is that you can tell how much a given government cares about this sort of thing, by how well they guard against other public health contamination risks, such as food-borne diseases. If the government cares enough to spend enough to have a good system in place to ensure we’re not getting constant outbreaks of Salmonella, Listeria, E. Coli, etc etc, then they more likely spend on behind-the-scenes public safety, too.

The potentially devastating consequences of an ePPP escape have led many scientists to advocate ending this type of research altogether:

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Want to learn more?

Since vaccines are not without their popular misunderstanders, we have written a little about that, here:

Vaccine Mythbusting

Take care!