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Two years into a global pandemic whose initial cause remains a subject of debate, Reuters, on March 11, published an especially jarring story: the World Health Organization, according to the news agency, had advised Ukraine to eliminate any high-threat pathogens it had in its biolabs, to reduce (and ideally eliminate) the chances that, were the Russian army to attack those facilities, pathogens would leak out and spread disease to the population.
The risk of such a disaster—either through some terrible accident, or by nefarious design—is real, but thankfully, not quite as big of a threat as it might seem. For one thing, Ukraine does not have a single Biosafety Level (BSL) 4 within its borders—these are the highest-security labs, which are authorized to store the most dangerous pathogens (like the world’s last remaining samples of smallpox). Additionally, many pathogens stored in lower BSL labs are vulnerable to heat and sunlight, meaning they are unlikely to spread widely were they to escape those facilities—which have safeguards of their own to prevent that from happening.
The risk that the chaos of the war will unleash pathogens from Ukrainian labs is “extremely unlikely. But, yes, in theory, it’s a possibility,” says Filippa Lentzos, the co-director of the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King’s College London. Even in peacetime, accidents at laboratories around the world that cause people to get sick are more common than one would hope; just this December, a lab worker in Taiwan was diagnosed with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, which was traced to a bite from an infected lab mouse. Lab leaks have threatened even more dire consequences; as Gregory Lewis, the acting head of the Biosecurity Research Group at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, points out, the last known death from…
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Source : time
