Pandemic threat that hasn’t gone away

In December 2014, two monkeys in outdoor cages at the Tulane National Primate Research Center, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, became ill with Burkholderia pseudomallei, a deadly bacteria in the federal government’s highest risk category, reserved for pathogens like smallpox, anthrax and Ebola. This is the category for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sees “significant potential for mass casualties or severe effects.” A short drive from the cages, there was a lab working with the pathogen, which at the time had never been found naturally in the continental United States. Some of the staff members who worked with the monkeys were not told of the infections for nearly a month after the pathogen was suspected and 10 days after it was confirmed.

In March 2015, the Tulane center’s director, Andrew Lackner, claimed that “various Burkholderia species have been present in domestic animals in Louisiana since at least 2004, long before any scientific study of the organism began” at the center.

Lackner also dismissed media reports of a possible lab leak as a “predictable news cycle” and said there was “no known threat to public health.” By then, though, the CDC had already determined that the bacteria in the monkeys was the exact strain studied in the center’s lab. An Agriculture Department report later documented a history of lax practices at the laboratory as well as problems with its wastewater treatment, which may have been how the pathogen had leaked. Much of this would not have been known if not for years of dogged reporting by Alison Young, a former investigative reporter for USA Today and a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. In her new book, “Pandora’s Gamble,” Young lays out the shocking extent of lax laboratory standards and procedures, and lack of accountability and transparency, in the United States and around the world. Young is a rare breed, an investigative journalist who has covered the CDC and biosafety issues since at least 2006, when she worked for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, long before the COVID pandemic.

Her book is full of calmly reported but jaw-dropping details of incident after incident in which research labs, more interested in public relations than public safety, have been opaque or even misleading about safety failures and laboratory-acquired infections. She reveals lab accidents that have gone unreported or details that have not been publicly known at the Army’s biolab at Fort Detrick in Maryland, at the CDC, at a San Francisco veterans medical center and elsewhere.

In December 2019, a research trainee’s breathing tube delivering safe, filtered air became disconnected while she was working at the University of Wisconsin with ferrets — whose upper respiratory tract resembles that of humans — potentially exposing her to the deadly bird flu virus H5N1. The strain had been genetically modified so that it could spread through airborne transmission among mammals, which researchers were trying to determine was possible. Such genetic modification, called gain of function research, had been allowed to resume only earlier that year after an almost five-year ban. The ban followed a public outcry over news in 2011 that researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands had manipulated the bird flu virus to be transmitted through the air to ferrets — and thus, potentially, among humans. H5N1 doesn’t normally spread among people easily, a big relief since the virus has a known human fatality rate of about 50%.

As Young reports, even though university officials were required to immediately report that the researcher had breathed room air, they waited two months to alert the Office of Science Policy of the National Institutes of Health, which oversees U.S. research with genetically engineered pathogens, and almost two months to tell the university’s own biosafety committee. The university on its own decided to end the trainee’s quarantine without telling state and local public health officials.

A representative of the university later defended its lack of openness to Young by telling her, “most people are also not equipped to appropriately evaluate the risk.” The NIH told Young that university officials did not think they needed to report the incident because they felt there was “no reasonable risk of virus exposure,” presumably because the hose was disconnected only briefly from the source of purified air.

Yet, during the COVID pandemic, we learned that airborne transmission can occur in even a few seconds and even at a distance.

The trainee researcher turned out not to have been infected. But “trust us” is not the proper response to a case in which the scientist could have been infected and spread the virus, even without obvious symptoms.

Lax lab safety procedures are a global problem. A Washington Post investigation reported recently that in the summer of 2019, hundreds of people in Lanzhou, China, got sick after thousands of people were exposed to bacteria that can cause brucellosis, after a government-run biomedical complex failed to properly disinfect its waste. A scientific paper published in November called it “possibly the largest laboratory accident in the history of infectious diseases.”

And yet, it took a month for the authorities in China to discover and fix the problem and four months before they informed the public.

The failure to detect in real time is a too-common feature of many lab accidents and biosafety mishaps. In 2012, in its first published report of its kind, the CDC reported 11 laboratory-acquired infections in laboratories over six years. Not a single one was reported or realized unless a lab worker was later discovered to have been infected.

Cities are a particular danger. Spillovers, when a novel animal virus infects a human, are common; however, pandemics are rare. New viruses can’t trigger a pandemic unless they also evolve to spread effectively from one human to another. Rural communities do not provide the same density and population to facilitate that as cities do. (That’s also why urban wet markets are dangerous).

Yet, a new global biosafety report shows that 75% of the labs with the highest-level safety, BSL-4, reserved for the most dangerous pathogens, and 80% of BSL-3+ labs, where viruses like SARS could be experimented on, are in cities — places with more than 50,000 people living within 2.5 miles of the lab.

There should also be uniform standards for biosafety for research that isn’t necessarily going to spark a pandemic but nevertheless poses a threat to the immediate environs.