Workers initially dismissed that any safety breach had occurred.

In another incident, a pipe burst on a lab waste-holding tank in 2018 at a US army research facility at Fort Detrick, near Washington DC. The university made the decision to end the quarantine of a potentially exposed lab worker without consulting Wisconsin public health officials, despite representations going back years that these health departments would be notified of “any potential exposure” during this kind of especially risky research. This secrecy extends not just to the public at large, but also to the government agencies we all are trusting to head off disaster when things go wrong at these facilities.įor example, when a safety breach occurred in 2019 at a University of Wisconsin-Madison lab experimenting with a dangerous and highly controversial lab-created H5N1 avian influenza virus, the university never told the public – or local and state public health officials.

The book provides numerous case studies of near-miss incidents, infections and outbreaks caused by lax safety at some of the world’s top labs and shows the extraordinary efforts that have been taken to downplay the significance of safety breaches and keep accidents secret.

My new book, Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, reveals how these and other kinds of lab accidents have happened with alarming frequency and how the lack of stringent, mandatory and transparent biosafety oversight and incident reporting is putting all of us at risk. Yet the public rarely learns about these incidents, which tend to be shrouded in secrecy by labs and the government officials whose agencies often both fund and oversee the research.

Nobody Was Here by Alison Pollet