Science continues to discuss the origins of COVID-19, to help safeguard the world against
future pandemics. History already has plenty of virus-related incidents to learn from,
especially the long and disturbing history of viruses that escaped from research labs.
In 1978, a year after the last recorded natural case and the disease was thought to be eradicated,
a woman in the United Kingdom died from smallpox. She was a medical photographer at
the Birmingham Medical School. The school was in the same building as a research laboratory where
smallpox was being studied. The scientists there were trying to contribute to the World
Health Organization’s eradication effort. She was the only fatality of the leak. The
official inquest said poor ventilation and inadequate safety procedures were at fault.
This wasn't the first accidental release of smallpox in Britain. Five years prior,
four people were infected at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
A lab assistant accidentally caused the contamination during a routine procedure.
She survived, but two people died. The investigation into the 1978 event took
a look farther back and revealed that this event wasn't the first either.
The official Report of the Investigation into the Cause of the 1978 Birmingham Smallpox
Occurrence reviewed yet another previous outbreak in the city.
Over 70 people in Birmingham contracted smallpox in 1966 from a medical photographer at the school.
The photographer worked in the Anatomy Department. The report said that even though the Department
of Anatomy was located on the floor directly above the virology department, nobody thought
to investigate the ventilation between the two floors and two labs until 12 years later.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or as it's more commonly known, SARS, first appeared in Guangdong,
China in 2002. The initial outbreak infected over 8,000 people in 29 countries over two years.
"And we need to know how big the population of people susceptible to the virus might be."
"So far that appears to be everyone with hands, a mouth and a nose."
The virus seemed to run its course in 2004, after killing 774 people. Dr. Jianfeng He, of Guangdong
provincial CDC, explained in the Journal of Thoracic Disease that SARS was highly fatal,
killing 10% of people that it infected. However, not all of those patients were
technically suffering from the same outbreak. In the summer of 2003, after five months of no
new cases, a research assistant in a Singapore laboratory contracted SARS, but he hadn't been
working with the disease. Although nobody else got sick and he recovered, the event triggered a
worldwide alert and scared public health officials who feared that the epidemic had returned.
In December, a SARS researcher from a lab in Taiwan tested positive.
According to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, he had been
working without the use of personal protective equipment. Even though he began experiencing
symptoms on an airplane, nobody else got sick. SARS escaped and infected people in China on
three separate occasions in 2004. A report from the World Health Organization said that
the National Institute of Virology in Beijing was the center of three separate SARS leaks.
This led to hundreds of quarantines, dozens infected, and one woman dead. The investigation
suggested that the institute's biosafety procedures were in urgent need of review.
Foot-and-mouth disease, often abbreviated to FMD,
is an extremely contagious viral disease that affects cattle and other cloven-footed livestock,
capable of being spread by people, contaminated objects, and animal products.
Because of the extremely contagious nature of the disease, countries
that face an outbreak will quickly find themselves subject to export restrictions.
It's so contagious that any sign of the virus in one animal can lead to entire herds being culled.
A 2001 outbreak in the U.K. ended with the slaughter of 6.5 million cattle, sheep, and pigs,
causing a $16 billion hit to the British economy. After six years of virus laying dormant,
FMD appeared some two miles from the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright.
An investigation ordered by the House of Commons revealed that the virus had most
likely leaked out from drainage pipes at the Institute, contaminating the surrounding soil.
FMD is considered so dangerous that a series of outbreaks in Canada and Mexico scared the
U.S. government into building a dedicated research facility to study the disease.
Originally built on a small island in Long Island Sound, the Plum Island Animal Disease
Center now studies all manner of other infectious diseases. But it remains the
only lab in the country that can work on the live virus for foot-and-mouth disease.
Partly because of its isolation, Plum Island has also been the center of several urban legends.
One example is a conspiracy theory that Lyme disease was created there by Nazi scientists
as a bio-weapon. Some people even think that the government uses the lab to perform
genetic experiments and create new animals. If there is anything scary about the Plum
Island facility, it could be that it has experienced its fair share of accidents.
Congress ordered an investigation into the facility in 2008 after the U.K. leak the previous
year. As it turns out, not only had FMD been released from the facility at least once in 1978,
but the report revealed "several accidents" going all the way back to 1954, the year it was built.
The Tulane National Primate Research Center in Louisiana is part of a network of seven
primate research facilities in the U.S. researching infectious diseases and
creating ways to fight bioterrorism threats. Among the nightmares kept on the shelves for
study are Ricin, HIV, tuberculosis, and a nasty little bacterium called Burkholderia pseudomallei.
Burkholderia affects both humans and animals, and because it's easy to collect,
it’s also easy to engineer strains that are resistant to antibiotics. Several countries have
studied the bacteria for use as a bioweapon. The USDA and CDC both launched full-scale
investigations into the Tulane Center when the dangerous bacteria escaped in 2015. Even
though the lab where research is performed on it is, as Tulane officials described it,
a "box-within-a-box within a box," it somehow escaped anyway. As a result, several research
monkeys and staff at the facility contracted Burkholderia. The disease-causing bacteria
clings easily to surfaces and travels well with moisture. Investigators concluded that the
likely cause of the breach was staff carrying the bacteria on their shoes and scrubs between labs.
"The last thing we need is for this thing to walk out of the lab on the bottom of someone's shoe."
Ebola frequently ranks among the scariest diseases humans have ever encountered,
and with good reason. According to the World Health Organization, Ebola is one of the deadliest
viruses on Earth with case fatality rates ranging from 25% to 90%. Since its discovery in 1976,
Ebola has been found in 18 different countries, including the United States,
although the vast majority have been in Africa, where it was first diagnosed.
The virus first appeared in the U.S. in 1989 at a private primate quarantine facility in Reston,
Virginia. After dozens of research monkeys imported from the Philippines died suddenly,
they were discovered to have a highly virulent breed of Ebola,
the Zaire strain, with a 90% fatality rate. Four workers at the facility tested positive
for Ebola soon after. Luckily for them, the workers contracted what is now known
as Ebola-Reston -- the only form of Ebola that isn't harmful to humans.
Ebola-Reston returned seven years later, again via monkeys from the Philippines.
This time they were imported by a company in Texas. One monkey died from the disease,
but another 49 were euthanized to prevent its spread among the other animals under quarantine.
Anthrax is a bacteria found in soil, and it commonly affects animals around the world.
It can also affect humans, in one of three ways, with varying levels of fatality.
According to the FDA, cutaneous anthrax kills approximately 20% of people it affects.
Fatality rates for gastrointestinal anthrax can range from 25% to 75%. And inhalation
anthrax has a fatality rate of at least 80%. The lethality of anthrax led to it being studied
for years as a biological weapon. It was used to deadly effect when five people were killed
by letters laced with anthrax spores in 2001. Anthrax was first used as a weapon as far
back in World War I. Following a rise in international concern about the use of bioweapons,
over 100 countries signed a treaty in 1972 that banned the development, possession,
and stockpiling of pathogens or toxins. It also required countries to destroy stockpiles of
anthrax bioweapons within 9 months of signing. Seven years later, the deadliest outbreak
of anthrax ever recorded killed at least 66 people in the Soviet Union,
supposedly due to contaminated meat. After the Cold War, and the collapse of the USSR,
it was discovered that the outbreak was caused by an accident at a secret illegal weapons facility.
The Vector State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology is deep in Siberian Russia
and houses one of the largest collections of dangerous viruses in the world. It is, in fact,
the only other place in the world besides the CDC in Atlanta permitted to store smallpox. It joins
Ebola, Marburg, anthrax, and other terrifying bugs at Vector, where researchers trawl through
their genetic codes for defenses against them. Some of the substances stored here have escaped,
several times. Between 1988 and 2004 there were three separate lab accidents at Vector.
The first was a researcher who contracted the Marburg virus and died in 1988.
Another worker contracted the same virus and thankfully survived two years later.
In 2004, another Vector researcher died after pricking herself with Ebola. In none of those
cases did the diseases ever actually escape the lab or infect anyone other than the initial case.
Then, at the tail end of 2019, the research center exploded.
The Vector labs were being renovated when a gas bottle exploded which sparked a 30-square-meter
fire. The explosion seemingly didn't unleash every pathogen in the place,
but it's still a stark reminder that these labs are never totally safe from devastating accidents.
The bacterial disease brucellosis, is one of the most common contagious zoonotic diseases,
capable of being transmitted between humans and animals. It has high rates of morbidity and has
the potential to cause permanent sterility. This bug kills a lot of animals, and while
it can infect humans as well, such cases are extremely rare and rarely fatal. But it's still
a versatile disease; the Mayo Clinic warns that: "Brucellosis can affect almost any part of your
body, including your reproductive system, liver, heart, and central nervous system."
The disease can leave survivors with complications ranging from arthritis to meningitis to
testicular infections and inflammations. Over 6,000 people in northwestern China
contracted brucellosis in 2020, and the government ended up testing 55,000 people
in the remote Gansu province. The outbreak originated at a biopharmaceutical factory
owned by China Animal Husbandry Industry Company, which was manufacturing brucellosis vaccines.
The company improperly disposed of the remnant bacteria used to make the vaccines.
The waste got carried to a veterinary research institute, where the first cases were recorded.
The vaccine production factory was closed down and dismantled shortly thereafter.
The 1918 flu epidemic was the first appearance of the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu.
It seemed to disappear in 1957 only to reappear 20 years later, in China and the Soviet Union.
This pandemic lasted from 1977 to 1978, killing some 700,000 people around the world.
"You have to love its simplicity. It's one billionth our size, and it's beating us."
A peculiar trait of the virus was that it generally only affected people
under 26. It turned out that this was because this particular strain
of influenza had already circulated the globe in the 1940s and 1950s.
According to the American Society for Microbiology, this was most likely not
a naturally-occurring event. In other words, it seems like someone may have kept a sample of H1N1,
and was experimenting with it 20 years later. This led to persistent suspicions
that the virus was an accidental release of a lab strain into the general population.
In the mid-20th century, doctors and scientists in Central and South America were combating a strain
of mosquito-borne encephalitis. It usually struck horses and donkeys, but would frequently cross
over to humans as well. Equine encephalitis causes severe fevers and can cause permanent neurological
damage or even death, especially in children. An animal vaccine was designed and distributed
to protect horses and mules, and thus people as well. However, because of inadequate vaccine
technology of the era, from the 1930s to the 1970s the vaccine actually caused most of
the outbreaks that it was trying to prevent. Then in 1995, a massive equine encephalitis
flare-up struck Venezuela and Columbia. This strain seemed to be an exact duplicate of a
1963 strain. It was very unusual, as viruses in the wild typically keep evolving — that's
why we need recurrent flu vaccines. A 2001 paper in the Journal of Virology made it clear that,
while they can't definitively rule out natural or other artificial causes,
"A far simpler explanation for the complete genomic sequence identity between the ... strains
is that the [1995 epidemic] resulted from the laboratory contamination."
Almost 100,000 people were infected, over 300 died, and many thousands were left with
long-term neurological issues from what may well have been an accidental lab leak.
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