Somehow, smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building. It turned out that the building that Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort. How did she get a disease that was supposed to have been eradicated? But Parker got worse and was admitted to the hospital, where testing determined that she had smallpox. When she developed a horrifying rash, doctors initially brushed it off as chicken pox.
Janet Parker was a photographer at Birmingham Medical School. Around 500 million people died of smallpox in the century before it was annihilated.īut in 1978, the disease cropped back up - in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. That moment came at the end of a decades-long campaign to eradicate smallpox - a deadly infectious disease that killed about 30 percent of those who contracted it - from the face of the earth. In 1977, the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in the wild. And we could reduce that risk without significantly impeding critical science. As long as viruses keep escaping the lab - in freak accidents, fires, explosions, equipment malfunctions, and human mistakes - we run a risk of catastrophe.
It’s by studying the Ebola virus, for example, that researchers were able to develop the current cocktail of Ebola treatments that may reduce it from a death sentence to a mild, treatable illness.īut our track record of disasters such as what just happened in Russia suggests that certain kinds of research - into making pathogens deadlier, say - might not be worth its risks. What should we do about that? The answer certainly isn’t that we should cut back on virology and pathogen research - research that has saved countless lives. From accidental smallpox and anthrax exposures to mistaken transmission of deadly flu strains, slip-ups with some of the world’s most dangerous substances occur hundreds of times every year. Outright explosions are relatively rare, but disastrous accidents that release dangerous pathogens are actually shockingly common - and not just in Russia, but in the United States and Europe as well. Will dangerous diseases escape the lab and infect the general population? Almost certainly not the vast majority of lab accidents, even serious lab accidents, don’t sicken anyone, and none yet has sparked a pandemic in humans.īut that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t give us pause. (Of course, Russian public reports on safety incidents are not always accurate.) The city’s mayor has stated that there is no threat to the general population, and a spokesperson for the center has said that no hazardous pathogens were stored in the room where the blast occurred. That said, storage procedures for deadly pathogens like smallpox are extremely strict. “Part of the wave of the force of the explosion would carry it away from the site when it was first stored,” Joseph Kam, an associate professor at the Stanley Ho Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told CNN. The other is in the United States.Įxperts say that under certain circumstances, an explosion could lead to the release of deadly pathogens. The lab is one of only two in the world known to still have samples of smallpox, which was eradicated from the wild in 1977.
Glass throughout the building was reportedly destroyed in the blast, and the fire reportedly spread through the building’s ventilation system. So lots of people were concerned when an explosion ripped through the facility on Monday.Īccording to Russian independent media, the laboratory was undergoing repairs when a gas bottle exploded, sparking a 30-square-meter fire that left one worker severely burned. During the Cold War, the lab developed biological weapons and defenses against them, and it reportedly stored dangerous strains of smallpox, anthrax, and Ebola among other viruses. Russia’s State Research Center of Virology, in the city of Koltsovo in Siberia, has one of the largest collections of dangerous viruses anywhere in the world.
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