Biosecurity Fundamentals

"During the COVID pandemic, we learned to design vaccines within weeks. Now, the bottleneck is testing that they work. To get even faster, we need innovations in clinical trial design."

Original text: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/04/from-warp-speed-to-100-days

Author(s): Witold Więcek

Original text:
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/impact-non-pharmaceutical-interventions-on-covid-19-transmission/covid-19-examining-the-effectiveness-of-non-pharmaceutical-interventions-executive-summary.pdf

Author(s): 
The Royal Society

Original text:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-opinion-lessons-learned-from-covid-pandemic-global-comparison/
Author(s):
Bloomberg Opinion

It will probably start with a cluster of unusual symptoms. Some of the people with the disease will know each other, but won’t have been exposed to animals, suggesting the infection can spread between people. Then more cases will start appearing in other areas, maybe even in other countries.

The next pandemic could take many forms, but a respiratory infection remains high on the list of probabilities. It could be a new flu virus, or a new coronavirus, or perhaps something else. It might emerge from a market, or a mink farm, or from another source. It may be years away, or months away – or it could be spreading now, yet to be detected.

People often talk about ‘pandemic preparedness’, but increasingly I think this is an unhelpful term. Only in hindsight can we sort events into ‘pandemics’ or ‘outbreaks’ or ‘isolated cases’. In real-time, all these paths begin with a cluster of infections. So if we want to curb pandemics, we need to think about what the response to a small new outbreak will look like.

Original text:
 https://kucharski.substack.com/p/we-arent-prepared-for-the-next-pandemic

Author(s):
 Adam Kucharski

Despite sharing a land border with China, Vietnam mounted one of the strongest early responses to COVID-19, reporting only 35 deaths by December 31, 2020, compared to 90,000 in the UK. This article highlights Vietnam's swift and proactive actions to detect and contain infections early in the pandemic. Key strategies included immediate border closures, extensive contact tracing, centralised quarantine, and clear, consistent government communication.

Original text:
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-vietnam

Author(s):
Todd Pollack, Guy Thwaites, Maia Rabaa et al.

This paper discusses critical questions for gaining early situational awareness in an outbreak, using COVID-19 as an example. It highlights key queries about the pathogen, transmission modes, population vulnerability, and available medical countermeasures. The paper shows how timely answers to these questions can inform effective public health responses, resource allocation, and policy decisions, ultimately improving outbreak management.

Original text:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01278-w

Author(s):
Joseph T. Wu, Kathy Leung, Tommy T. Y. Lam, Michael Y. Ni, Carlos K. H. Wong, J. S. Malik Peiris & Gabriel M. Leung

This report covers the current landscape in pathogen early warning and biosurveillance, highlights challenges and identifies opportunities from emerging technologies. You will have the opportunity to dig deeper into some of the new technologies in the pre-class exercise and the optional readings.

Original text:
https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/toward-a-global-pathogen-early-warning-system/

Author(s): A product of the Janne E. Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons, an institute of the Council on Strategic Risks. Authors: Natasha Bajema, Bill Beaver, Christine Parthemore, Adejare Atanda, Joanne Horn, David Manheim, Daniel Regan, Sid Sharma, Jacob Swett, and Nikki Teran. Edited by Christine Parthemore and Francesco Femia.

This resource provides a brief introduction to some of the most common terms used in infectious disease epidemiology.

Original text:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zUcRUXWFjIoRxx3wM35okua2hSLYaDW-lLboJa77tUg/edit#heading=h.rd77fsy9cdni

Author(s):
Joshua Blake

DNA synthesis represents the primary interface between the digital and physical worlds when it comes to synthetic biology - the point at which potentially hazardous information could become an actually dangerous piece of biological material. No national government legally mandates the screening of DNA synthesis orders, although members of the International Gene Synthesis Consortium voluntarily screen DNA synthesis orders and customers. This article briefly summarises the problem and recommends five potential policy areas for regulation.

Original text:
 https://ifp.org/preventing-the-misuse-of-dna-synthesis/

Author(s):
 Bridget Williams and Rowan Kane

This Wikipedia article provides an overview of the Biological Weapons Convention, a disarmament treaty that bans the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons. Despite 185 states being party to the treaty, there are substantial challenges including a lack of funding and difficulty verifying compliance.

Original text:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

Author(s): 
Wikipedia