Moratorium on Research Intended To Create Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens

Moratorium on Research Intended To Create Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens

Research on highly pathogenic organisms is crucial for medicine and public health, and we strongly support it. This work creates a foundation of new knowledge that provides critical insights around the world’s most deadly infectious diseases, and it can lay groundwork for the future development of new diagnostics, medicines, and vaccines. Almost all such research can be performed in ways that p...

Erratum for Lipsitch and Inglesby, Moratorium on Research Intended To Create Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens

Volume 5, no. 6, doi:10.1128/mBio.02366-14, 2014. On page 2 (PDF), the seventh paragraph of the section headed “Risk Analysis” should read as follows: Putting all these numbers together, the select agent data suggest that a laboratory-year of experimentation on virulent, transmissible influenza virus might have an 0.01% to 0.1% chance of killing 20 million to 1.6 billion, or an expected death t...

Rethinking Biosafety in Research on Potential Pandemic Pathogens

If accidentally released, mammalian-transmissible influenza A/H5N1 viruses could pose a greater threat to public health than possibly any other infectious agent currently under study in laboratories, because of such viruses' likely combination of transmissibility and virulence to humans. We advocate explicit risk-benefit assessments before work on such pathogens is permitted or funded, improvem...

Ethical Alternatives to Experiments with Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens

1 Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 2 Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Department of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases), Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, Unit...

Harmful moratorium on stem cell research.