On Thursday, biosecurity researchers published the world’s first complete map of laboratories of maximum biological containment. These facilities, known in the United States as Level Four Biosafety Laboratories (BSL-four), paint with the deadliest pathogens, high-security precautions, from a pressurized suit space “to compressed air laboratories, and until now, have never been published on a central list.
At a webinar on Thursday, the authors presented a series of recommendations on the map to expand a comprehensive technique to biosecurity.
“The goal of our assignment is to increase the public wisdom of the biosecurity laboratories of point four and, above all, national and foreign virus control policies,” said Filippa Lentzos, biosecurity researcher at King’s College London.
This means everything from up-to-date education on how to disable a virus to broader protocols for reporting injuries when they occur.
“Clinical paintings on pathogens are vital for public health, biomedical progress and disease prevention,” Lentzos said. “But some of these activities pose significant dangers” to both laboratory staff and the public. “There are also protective hazards that could possibly be pathogens stolen from a lab, or that a lab member would possibly use their knowledge, skills and for malicious purposes. “
To be clear, despite this week’s media slag, there is no biological evidence linking SARS-CoV-2 to such a laboratory. Studies of the virus genome suggest, albeit indirectly, that it was not biologically designed or cultivated through humans. Although many virologists say it is conimaginable that in the past undetected SARS-CoV-2 has inflamed a researcher, it is widely accepted that a laboratory-related contagion effect is more likely. This month a new dog virus was discovered in Malaysia, when there is no evidence of a new pathogen leaving a laboratory, and determining the exact origin of the 2001 coronavirus outbreak, SARS-1, took years, even under much less tense geopolitical circumstances (these are wild bats and caged civetas).
This does not mean that laboratory protection is not a pressing problem, wherever SARS-CoV-2 appeared, the threat of laboratory injuries increases with the number of laboratories. According to the report, a maximum of 21 biosecurity laboratories have been established. In the more than ten years, the actual number would possibly be higher: researchers have been unable to locate the dates of creation of some 20 laboratories, according to the report, three-quarters of them are in urban areas, increasing the threat of a mistake. becoming an epidemic.
And there have been high-risk incidents in these laboratories, which for the most part involve a BSL-4 lab that sends samples of a pathogen, such as Ebola and Marburg, which had not been absolutely inactive in a less secure facility. a user in Beijing died of SARS-1 after his daughter, a virologist, became inflamed in a lab accident (this procedure was not performed in a BSL-4 lab and SARS is not classified as a higher-risk pathogen).
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The challenge of seeking to count these amenities is that there is no transparent foreign definition of a BSL-4 lab. At the end of the day, there are labs that would possibly have the ability to transfer to BSL-4 in a crisis, or BSL-4 cell labs that can also perform autopsies in the event of anthrax outbreak. There are also no binding agreements for protective precautions in maximum safety laboratories, although there are a number of recommendations from the World Health Organization.
The map published tuesday includes 59 laboratories, as well as initial data on their biosecurity protocols, most in Europe, spread across the European Union, Russia and various non-EU countries, 14 in North America and thirteen in Asia. .
Of the 23 countries with BSL-4 laboratories, only 17 have national biosecurity associations or are members of foreign associations. According to researchers, foreign agencies deserve to help the remaining countries expand their own laws and internals according to global standards. “it’s not enough for a single lab to have its own policies,” says Gregory Koblentz, co-author and biodefensive researcher at George Mason University.
But this means that an organization wants a foreign mandate to oversee the prevention of biotechnological threats. During the webinar, Lentzos discussed two possibilities: the World Health Organization or the United Nations Convention on Biological Weapons. configured, is configured to do this kind of work, ” he said. “A more herbal adequacy would be with WHO, but WHO does not have such a mandate. So we want some kind of restructuring. “
This kind of foreign collaboration can go further, as U. S. politicians seek to blame China for COVID-19, making it more difficult to save it from a long-term lab-related epidemic by expanding tensions on the issue.
The other main challenge facing such a strange framework is the progression of a transparent threat assessment of other types of research. Lentzos referred to the recent “utility-as-a-gain research” concentrate, in which microbes are changed in a laboratory to examine what human pathogens can look like. “From our point of view, serving as a gain is just a potentially high-threat type of research. Just knowing if a lab is researching the gain of serving as it doesn’t say much . . . You want to identify high-risk searches more generally. »
And that means identifying other low-security labs that can also conduct high-risk research. This project, according to the researchers, focused on a very narrow category of laboratories only as a starting point. BSL-4 laboratories that deal exclusively with animal pathogens, as well as BSL-3 facilities, which paint with less deadly but incredibly harmful pathogens, such as tuberculosis and plague.
“When we talked to colleagues about the study before, we were told, okay, you’re mapping BSL-4 labs. But is that where your dangers lie?” Lentzos explained. ” We absolutely agree. BSL-4 laboratories are the tip of the iceberg. “
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