A little Australian biological mishap
Just a few missing samples...
While it feels like it has been weeks, I have been enjoying the past two days celebrating my birthday =), but now we are back. While I finish my next article focusing on the paradoxical effect of how SARS-CoV-2 sometimes just… cures cancer… a little odd event took the news by surprise.
Thank you for all the birthday wishes !
Deadly virus samples went missing from lab in ‘major biosecurity breach,’ say authorities
Hundreds of deadly virus samples are missing from a laboratory in Australia, the Queensland government announced on Monday.
The government has instructed Queensland Health — Australia’s public health department — to launch an investigation into what’s being described as a "major historical breach of biosecurity protocols," according to the online media statement.
It was reported that 323 vials of multiple infectious viruses — including Hendra virus, Lyssavirus and Hantavirus — went missing from Queensland’s Public Health Virology Laboratory in August 2023.
Hendra is a zoonotic (animal-to-human) virus that has only been found in Australia.
Hantavirus is a family of viruses that can lead to serious illness and death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while Lyssavirus is a group of viruses that can cause rabies.
Sam Scarpino, PhD, director of AI and life sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, confirmed that the situation in Australia amounts to a "critical biosecurity lapse."
"The pathogens reported missing are all high-consequence and could pose a threat to the public," he told Fox News Digital.
The three pathogens can have very high fatality rates in humans, Scarpino said, but they do not transmit readily from person to person.
In the past years few years the world has been faced with many “lab incidents”, mostly involving Chinese nationals, such as the Winnipeg Incident, where two Chinese nationals were caught shipping virus samples to China, illegally. Quote from the article below.
Stealing and smuggling pathogens is nothing new, with many of the culprits having China as a destination, that is how espionage and IP theft works. But a highly coincidental timing when the FBI in 2018 and 2019 tracked Chinese individuals smuggling viable samples of both MERS and SARS.
What is worse is when things just go missing, like when the Pasteur Institute in Paris lost 2.000 vials of SARS and also to the unauthorized import of an inactivated form of the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) on a flight from Korea to the Pasteur in 2015. (Pasteur helped build the WIV).
To this day, we don’t know what happened to the Sudan bio lab captured by rebels. With luck samples and everything else was mishandled and destroyed in the process, something easy to do if you have no training. And now we can add this incident with Australia. Australia is under significant Chinese influence, its biggest trade partners, and of course China is the number one country with students in Australia…
A few samples or vials of pathogens already constitute an international crime against many different laws, 323 samples are outright an act of espionage for biological warfare purposes, whoever the perpetrator is.
I have only 2 remaining questions.
How interesting will 2025 be ?
How many of these incidents have we never come to hear about, ever ?
Your support enables me to do my interdisciplinary, unorthodox research, thank you !
I would love a very boring year... yes... boring is good. In general. Your posts are never boring, so there's that.
It's the pandemic of moral corruptness and evil that is being unleashed. I see black hearts everywhere, wishing death and destruction on innocents. I hope your algorithms can quickly locate curious outbreaks and point to accessible treatments. Provided they don't do an internet virus and shut you down ;/
May you have many more birthdays full of good health!
I wonder if Canadiian virologist David Speicher, who worked in Australia, knows anything about this?