Controversial research on dangerous pathogens

The nation’s federal laboratories have had an embarrassing summer as far as safety is concerned.

It all started with an anthrax mishap at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in June. Then forgotten vials of smallpox turned up at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in July. Then there was news of an accidental mix-up of bird-flu with a less deadly flu strain at the CDC. Luckily, there are no reports of anyone getting sick from any of these.

2014 has been a bad year in the nation’s labs. A series of serious safety incidents at several CDC and FDA laboratories has led many to question the integrity of some of the riskiest research on the planet.

So far, this has led to the resignation of the person in charge of the CDC’s high-level anthrax research. Other investigations are ongoing.

Foreign Policy recently reported that an ISIS laptop computer captured in Syria includes instructions on how to weaponize bubonic plague. Yes, the plague. The plague that caused the Black Death pandemic that killed roughly 25 million Europeans in the 14th century.

But is a plague weapon even possible? How crazy is it to think that plague could be found and turned into a usable weapon? Here’s a rundown:

It’s been a rough summer for US government laboratories studying dangerous pathogens — after a series of safety mishaps were made public.

And now it’s getting worse. Alison Young of USA Today unearthed documents showing that more than 1,000 lab mishaps involving bioterrorism agents were reported to federal regulators from 2008 to 2012.

Sixty-year-old vials of live smallpox samples discovered in a lab, accidentally exposing workers to anthrax, and unintentionally shipping a deadly strain of H5N1 bird flu to another lab: these are just a few of the recent safety slip-ups by federal scientists in the US.

These potentially deadly accidents have reignited a concern: If these labs, reputed to be among the safest in the world, can make such hazardous mistakes, what about all the others?

Scientists find the strangest things when they’re cleaning out old refrigerators. Like… smallpox.

Last week, employees at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland were cleaning out an old storage room when they happened upon six glass vials of smallpox that had been packed up in a cardboard box, placed in a refrigerator, and then forgotten.

If there’s one thing that makes viruses so tricky to deal with, it’s that they evolve so quickly. This year’s seasonal flu vaccine might not be useful next year. And the fast evolution of HIV has kept it one step ahead of potential cures ever since we’ve discovered it. And then there are all these viruses in animals — like bird flu, swine flu, and now MERS — that have evolved the ability to hop into people.

So why do viruses evolve so rapidly?

On June 19, Reuters first reported that dozens of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had possibly been exposed to live anthrax and were being offered treatment such as antibiotics and vaccines. It’s the kind of thing that no one ever wants to see happen, especially because anthrax has the potential to be exceptionally deadly. Luckily, the risk right now seems to be fairly low.

On June 13, workers noticed that samples of anthrax that they thought were dead were indeed alive. They were samples at a lab responsible for killing live anthrax before giving it to labs with less strict safety protocols for further work.

For the sixth time, the World Health Organization has declined to destroy the smallpox virus once and for all.

Last week, officials met at the WHO’s annual World Health Assembly to discuss many issues, including whether to destroy the last remaining lab samples of the smallpox virus — and eliminate any chance of it escaping. (The disease was eradicated back in 1980.) There were all sorts of arguments for and against.

Should we destroy the last living samples of smallpox? The World Health Organization will decide this month. Some major microbiologists are arguing that we should keep them to help develop smallpox treatments and that we should discuss possible new experiments with live smallpox to better understand it, in general.

The reasons to destroy the virus seem fairly obvious. After all, smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century. And despite all the best precautions, there’s a slight risk that it could escape. (Or that a worker could steal some.)

A few years ago, a researcher took the deadly bird flu, turned it into a highly contagious version, and then tried to publish how he did it. The ensuing controversy delayed the publication of his paper for six months.

What is bird flu?

This is not your run-of-the-mill seasonal flu. The bird flu we’re talking about is H5N1, which the world started freaking out about in the early 2000s when it started jumping from poultry to people in Asia. It seems to be very deadly, killing about 60% of the 650 people who have had their cases confirmed by medical experts. (However, it’s currently impossible to get actual mortality rates because there could be a lot of people who never seek medical help or never get properly diagnosed.)