In 2018, scientists in Canada successfully synthesized horsepox —a virus related to smallpox, one of the greatest scourges the world has ever faced—demonstrating how viral synthesis could threaten global disease eradication efforts. The experiment illustrated a significant problem: no globally accepted mechanisms exist for identifying risks associated with experiments that…
Global Catastrophic Biological Risks (GCBRs), a term of art for those who study and work to prevent worst-case scenarios, are biological risks of unprecedented scale that could cause such significant damage to human civilization that they undermine its long-term potential. Left unchecked, high-consequence biological events can become GCBRs, leading to…
When a Zika virus outbreak initially isolated in Uganda’s Zika Forest unexpectedly emerged across several Pacific island states in 2007, Yap Island was hit particularly hard. More than 70% of those living on the tiny Micronesia island—5,000 people—were infected. Several years later, a Zika outbreak in French Polynesia from 2013…
Early-August 2019 reports on the Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were chilling. Amid increased violence in the affected region, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported interruptions in efforts to contain the outbreak. These interruptions coupled with concerns about high rates of population movement from outbreak-affected areas…
From May to July 2015, public health experts and leaders in Asia and around the world anxiously watched an alarming and deadly outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in the Republic of Korea, which sickened 186 and killed 38.a On June 18 of that year, Thailand notified the…
Today, nearly two-thirds of known pathogens and three-quarters of newly emerging pathogens are zoonotic—meaning they spread from animals to humans. This dangerous trend toward disease spillover from animals to humans can be traced to a host of modern-day factors, including increased human encroachment on wildlife territory, land-use changes that increase…