With suspicions growing over a possible lab leak tied to the coronavirus pandemic, China’s startling lab-safety record merits close examination.
With suspicions growing over a possible lab leak tied to the coronavirus pandemic, China’s startling lab-safety record merits close examination.
‘W hile there is always some risk for lab accidents, risk is not reality.” — Lim Poh Lian, senior consultant at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases in Singapore, to National Public Radio, April 23, 2020.
2004: In the aftermath of a small outbreak of the original SARS virus, well after the main outbreak that ended in summer 2003, a WHO investigation concluded that the Beijing Centers for Disease Control made critical errors in handling samples of the virus. “The patient was allowed to travel between Beijing and her home province of Anhui, to the west of Shanghai, while sick . . . the patient received medical care in both Beijing and Anhui but was still allowed to travel while sick, despite her high risk occupation and the fact that her mother also had a fever. The mother subsequently died.”
“Clearly there was a link to the [Beijing, not Wuhan] Institute of Virology, and our investigations are still ongoing, but we haven’t found a single incident that links the two cases of laboratory workers at the institute, so it appears to be two separate breaches of bio-safety, and we can’t find any single incident or accident that explains either case,” said Dr. Julie Hall, WHO’s coordinator in China of communicable disease surveillance and response. “It has raised real concerns about bio-safety in general, how bio-safety guidelines are implemented, and how that is supervised and monitored.”
Subsequent investigations concluded a “batch of supposedly inactivated SARS virus that was brought from a high-containment facility into a low-safety diarrhea research lab where the two were working . . . In a breach of standard safety procedures, the researcher who carried out the inactivation — identified only by a family name, ‘Ren’ — had not tested whether the virus was truly inactive, according to the panel.”
December 2006: A study of the SARS leak response by the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau concluded that “Lab bio-safety programs should be made and should be strictly abided by. Studies in highly pathogenic viruses such as SARS coronavirus should be utmost cautious. . . . Management systems of occupational exposure to virus and disease surveillance need to be strengthened to take all risk factors into account so as to detect potential patients with infectious disease as early as possible.”
November 2007: While not technically a lab accident, one criminal investigation suggested that large amounts of biohazardous material were frequently disposed of using dangerous and unsanitary methods: “A farmer from Sichuan Province named Zhang Xiuqiong was arrested for illegally collecting hazardous medical waste. Chongqing environmental protection officials, who found 33.9 tons of medical waste inside a residential building, described the scene as ‘shocking.’ The facility was full of medical waste including blood transfusion bags that still contained blood. It took fifteen medical waste vehicles eight hours to clean up the site.”
2010: “In a survey of 231 fourth-year medical students published in the Chinese journal Northwest Medical Education in 2010, 19 percent were unfamiliar with the term ‘laboratory biosafety.’ Seventy-nine percent had heard the term but weren’t completely sure what it meant.”
September 3, 2011: “On the heels of a damaging laboratory outbreak that sickened 27 students, leaders at China’s Northeast Agricultural University last week dismissed two administrators, apologized for insufficient safety practices, and offered thousands of dollars in compensation to the students, who contracted brucellosis while dissecting goats in an anatomy course last December.”
2012: A graduate student in Shanghai, name unknown, died after opening a poison-gas cylinder.
August 11, 2014: Two science researchers, Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester, published a paper suggesting that the odds are better than one in four that “one of these viruses will escape from a lab and seed the very pandemic the researchers claim they are trying to prevent.”
Klotz is senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, and Sylvester is director of the Walter Cronkite Science and Medical Journalism Program at Arizona State University. They wrote, “from the calculations in two in-depth pandemic risk analyses, there is a substantial probability that a pandemic with over a 100-million fatalities could be seeded from an undetected lab-acquired infection (LAI), if a single infected lab worker spreads infection as he moves about in the community. From the Klotz analysis, there is about a 1–30 percent probability, depending on assumptions, that, once infected, the lab worker will seed a pandemic.”
October 12, 2014: Li Ning, a leading expert at transgenic technologies at China Agricultural University, was arrested on corruption charges; in early 2020, Chinese courts sentenced him to twelve years in prison for embezzling 37.56 million yuan. Shanghai-based publication The Paper later reported that he had earned 10.17 million yuan ($1.46 million) by “illegally selling off lab animals and experimental milk.”
April 5, 2015: “A gas explosion killed one graduate student and injured four others in a chemistry lab at the China University of Mining and Technology located in the eastern Chinese city of Xuzhou.”
September 22, 2015: “A Peking University chemistry building caught fire after a hydrogen tank leaked. The fire did not result in any injuries.”
December 18, 2015: An explosion in the laboratory of the chemistry department of Tsinghua University in Beijing killed one post-doctoral student. The accident was attributed to an explosion of a hydrogen tank in the lab. Luo Min, a chemistry professor at Ningxia University located in the north-western Chinese city of Yinchuan, later told Chemistry World that, “The bloody accident reflects a systematic negligence of safety in our labs.” In the same article, Yin Yanzi, a post-doctorate researcher at Cornell University and formerly an associate professor of materials chemistry at Hubei University of Technology in central China, said that “compared with labs in the US, Chinese labs generally have poor safety and less sophisticated safety equipment.”
2016: While not including China, “In a survey of biosafety level (BSL) 2 and 3 laboratories in 7 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, 30% of Class II BSCs tested were poorly designed, incorrectly installed, not certified, or being operated improperly.”
April 2017: Klotz, of the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, reported to the 2017 meeting for the Biological Weapons Convention that the world is whistling past the graveyard on the risks of a serious lab accident: “Those who support this research either believe the probability of community release is infinitesimal, or the benefits in preventing a pandemic are great enough to justify the risk. In the author’s opinion, it would take extraordinary benefits and significant risk reduction via extraordinary biosafety measures to correct such a massive overbalance of highly uncertain benefits to potential risks. No one can be sure how virulent or airborne transmissible in humans these potential pandemic viruses would be if released into the community. In the best-case scenario, they would soon die out with little to no sickness and no deaths; however, just the possibility of a pandemic dictates that we must proceed with the utmost caution.”
May 2018: A profile of Luo Dongsheng, part of a team of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology collecting samples from a cave in Hubei, central China, noted that, “Luo’s team has collected a full rack of swabs and bagged a dozen live bats for further testing back at the lab.” A picture illustrating the story showed the researchers with exposed skin on their wrists.
December 26, 2018: Three students were killed in an explosion in a laboratory at Beijing Jiaotong University while carrying out sewage-treatment experiments. The Beijing Emergency Management Bureau investigation subsequently concluded that, “the students purchased and stored dangerous chemicals and carried out risky experiments in violation of regulations. University personnel also failed to oversee and manage the safety of laboratories and scientific research projects.”
Sometime in 2018–2019: According to Voice of America, “About a year before the coronavirus outbreak, a security review conducted by a Chinese national team found the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] did not meet national standards in five categories.”
September 2019: Yuan Zeming, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, offered an assessment of the state of biosafety in Chinese laboratories in general in the Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity in September 2019:
. . . biosafety measures and practices are vital in daily laboratory operations hence a highly qualified, motivated, and skilled biosafety supervisor is needed not only for overseeing solid containment but also in laboratory risk management. Currently, most laboratories lack specialized biosafety managers and engineers. In such facilities, some of the skilled staff is composed by part-time researchers. This makes it difficult to identify and mitigate potential safety hazards in facility and equipment operation early enough. Nonetheless, biosafety awareness, professional knowledge, and operational skill training still need to be improved among laboratory personnel.
October 21, 2019: Gao Hucheng, a former minister of commerce, issued a report to the Chinese legislature proposing the national government establish “a unified biosecurity standard for pathogenic microorganism laboratories and implement classified management of pathogenic microorganisms. . . . The laboratory should prevent laboratory animals from escaping, and conduct harmless disposal after using them, and should not put them into the market . . . The high-level pathogenic microorganism laboratory should accept the supervision of the public security organs and other departments on its security work, so as to prevent the leakage, loss, theft, and robbery of highly pathogenic microorganisms.”
November–December 2019: The first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, China.
Ironically, if COVID-19 was ultimately caused by human negligence, it would actually be the second highly contagious disease outbreak in China in December 2019 that was caused by someone handling dangerous materials and not being sufficiently careful.
December 12, 2019: It was initially believed that some sort of lab leak at the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science caused 65 people to contract brucellosis, “which can lead to incapacitation and permanent damage of the central nervous system.” But subsequent investigation found that the cause was a leak at the Zhongmu Lanzhou biological pharmaceutical factory, “which occurred between late July to late August last year, according to the city’s Health Commission. While producing Brucella vaccines for animal use, the factory used expired disinfectants and sanitizers — meaning not all bacteria were eradicated in the waste gas. This contaminated waste gas formed aerosols that contained the bacteria — and leaked into the air, carried by wind down to the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute, where the outbreak first hit.”