As Alison Young reports in her new book, Pandora’s Gamble: “The governance structures around the world are a hodgepodge of biosafety and biosecurity guidance, institutional self-policing and fragmented regulatory oversight systems. Unlike nuclear facilities, biological labs are subject to inconsistent global rules. Yet there remains little formal international mechanism for registering, let alone policing, such labs to ensure they adhere to high safety standards. The list of serious outbreaks suspected to be caused by such leaks over the decades is a long one, involving smallpox, anthrax, influenza, Sars, Covid, foot and mouth, brucellosis and others. The rush to build such labs started 20 years ago in the wake of the Sars epidemic and this has significantly increased the risk of dangerous and sometimes novel viruses or bacteria leaking accidentally. Since the emergence of Covid, more than a dozen high-level biosafety laboratories (more serious than the one in Khartoum) have opened, or are set to open, around the world. That’s a worrying enough statement at the best of times, but set against the worldwide proliferation of biological facilities, where risky pathogens are stored and studied, and after a lethal pandemic that may well have begun in a lab, it is an alarming harbinger. It was said that power cuts may threaten the safe containment of those samples. Fighters had seized a biological laboratory that houses samples of measles and cholera. Last week a horrifying report emerged from Khartoum, where poor Sudanese civilians are being terrorised by internal conflict.
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