Containing the accidental laboratory escape of potential pandemic influenza viruses

BMC Medicine

Research Article

Stefano Merler¹  Marco Ajelli¹  Laura Fumanelli²  Alessandro Vespignani³ 

[1] Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento, Italy;Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento, Italy;Department of Mathematics, University of Trento, Trento, Italy;Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems, Northeastern University, 02115, Boston, MA, USA;Computational Epidemiology Laboratory, Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Torino, Italy;Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University, 02138, Cambridge, MA, USA;

关键词: BSL Laboratory;    Influenza;    Agent-based model;    Outbreak containment;    Contact tracing;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1741-7015-11-252

 received in 2013-07-10, accepted in 2013-11-07,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe recent work on the modified H5N1 has stirred an intense debate on the risk associated with the accidental release from biosafety laboratory of potential pandemic pathogens. Here, we assess the risk that the accidental escape of a novel transmissible influenza strain would not be contained in the local community.MethodsWe develop here a detailed agent-based model that specifically considers laboratory workers and their contacts in microsimulations of the epidemic onset. We consider the following non-pharmaceutical interventions: isolation of the laboratory, laboratory workers’ household quarantine, contact tracing of cases and subsequent household quarantine of identified secondary cases, and school and workplace closure both preventive and reactive.ResultsModel simulations suggest that there is a non-negligible probability (5% to 15%), strongly dependent on reproduction number and probability of developing clinical symptoms, that the escape event is not detected at all. We find that the containment depends on the timely implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions and contact tracing and it may be effective (>90% probability per event) only for pathogens with moderate transmissibility (reproductive number no larger than R0 = 1.5). Containment depends on population density and structure as well, with a probability of giving rise to a global event that is three to five times lower in rural areas.ConclusionsResults suggest that controllability of escape events is not guaranteed and, given the rapid increase of biosafety laboratories worldwide, this poses a serious threat to human health. Our findings may be relevant to policy makers when designing adequate preparedness plans and may have important implications for determining the location of new biosafety laboratories worldwide.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Merler et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.