Hacker News Reader

Comment by abnry | Hacker News Reader

How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.

View on HN

There was a COVID 19 lab leak in Taiwan about a year into the pandemic.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/4374289

Six errors contributed to this leak.

A while ago a researcher at the Univ. of Chicago died of the plague. Although most labs use a mutated form that can't get iron needed to reproduce, he had a medical condition that caused an excess of iron in his blood that might have yet the bacteria grow.

However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.

Wow 500$ for an NGS kit to detect it before working there would have been money well spent

He was a professor so I think he started long before a NGS kit was even a thing. Also, the rumor seems to have been that he kept some personal items in the same fridge as samples and that there was cross-contamination or a mixup. All very much hearsay though.

In the US, chipmunks out west sometimes carry it. You go to a national park, you see a cute little chipmunk, you decide to feed it (which you're not supposed to do anyway), you get really close to it...

A few people get infected that way. Not a thousand a year, but some every few years.

Bubonic plague is known to be active in Colorado, I think there are a handful of cases each year

If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.

> avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine

I thought at least fleas could transfer it between mammals?

Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.

Current thought in the academy is that the flea-rat vector wasn't the dominant vector for the medieval plague "Black Death" mortality event, but human-flea-human. See also 2018 PNAS paper Katharine Dean, Nils Stenseth, Boris Schmid at Oslo. Basically, Northern Eurasian people were really gross, Mongols even moreso, and that provided the vector for a dominant human-flea-human spread. The rat vector, we're missing evidence that should be there: mass rat mortality; fast & huge mortality in areas with few rats; clustering followed human networks, not rodent networks. Also the kind of flea. Check the refs for more details.

The initial infection though, definitely from a central Eurasian rodent, likely a marmot somewhere near Kyrgyzstan.

Endemic in Antananarivo (very many deaths per year), not sure about the rest of Madagascar.

Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...

Janet Parker was the last person to die of smallpox and, yes, she caught it in a lab [1].

[1]: https://whyy.org/segments/the-tragic-case-of-smallpoxs-final...

There is an interesting (and frankly terrifying) book called biohazard by the former head of the soviet covert bioweapons program during the cold war and it seemed it was not that uncommon to have random screw ups at even high level labs resulting in the deaths of sometimes a lot of unfortunate people. Of course there was also a culture of cover up and not admitting mistakes as well for all sorts of reasons including the fact that they aren't supposed to be working on bioweapons in the first place as well as the usual punishments for screwing something up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com