Best biosecurity coverage of 2024

Though the COVID pandemic has become an afterthought for many, experts encourage people not to get too complacent; the next pandemic could be lurking just around the corner. In Africa, a deadly version of mpox circulating in  Democratic Republic of the Congo threatened to spark a wider outbreak. Not only that, but a mysterious disease killing children in that country remained unreported to global health authorities for over a month. In the United States, avian influenza appeared in cattle herds, putting workers at risk of exposure to a virus that could be just a few mutations away from becoming a real human threat. Meanwhile, the incoming Trump administration appears poised to place in charge of US public health agencies an activist who has spent years sowing doubt about vaccines, an effective means of sidestepping the pathogens constantly lurking about humanity’s doorstep.

A through line in much of the Bulletin’s biosecurity coverage of 2024 was a focus on infectious diseases—the toll they can exact (did one fell the mighty Roman empire?), the role climate change is playing in their spread, and even the non-natural routes by which they may jump into humans.

The following is a sample of some of the best of our work in the bio realm over the last year.

A ‘plague’ comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history

Could a mysterious plague have spelled the end of the Roman Empire? Certainly, the 200-year Pax Romana period of prosperity and peace ended around 166 AD as a novel disease swept across Eurasia. Though the Antonin plague cannot shoulder all the blame for the fall of “eternal Rome,” the western half of the empire never recovered from the pandemic and instead slogged on in decline for another two centuries. The philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius “may have rallied Rome during the first wave. But when the plague struck northern Italy a few years later, he abandoned his friends and soldiers to a dark winter of sickness,” Colin Elliot writes in the Bulletin’s most read new article of 2024.

A more common enemy: How climate change spreads diseases and makes them more dangerous

From dengue fever to Lyme disease, a warming climate is threatening to change where and when infectious diseases pose a threat. Georgios Pappas writes about how climate change is affecting both pathogens themselves, like the fungi Candida auris, which might be adapting to higher temperatures, and discase vectors like mosquitos and ticks, which are moving into new areas.

A rising danger in the Arctic: As climate change melts permafrost, microbes will emerge. The world isn’t paying enough attention to the potential threat they pose

Zombie viruses? In recent years, as the arctic permafrost melts under the heat of a warming planet, once frozen bodies, the victims of smallpox and scourges of hundreds of years ago have emerged from the ground. Some worry about reviving these long-ago “zombie” pathogens, but, truthfully, they may be “be the least of our Arctic disease worries”; the not-so permanent permafrost contains thousands of unstudied microbes, Valarie Brown writes. And although the risk of these spilling over into human populations remain uncertain, experts “point out that when data is sparse, informed hypothesizing can lead to an improved strategy for responding to crises now unforeseen.”

MIT researchers ordered and combined parts of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus. Did they expose a security flaw?

What’s the best way to ensure that emerging technology is accessible to researchers and others to promote beneficial work while cutting off malevolent actors? It’s a thorny question across many types of dual-use technologies. In the case of synthetic DNA, a consortium of producers has pledged to check orders for red-flag biological sequences. But researchers at MIT found they were able to order all of the material necessary to reconstruct the 1918 influenza virus, raising questions about the adequacy of the monitoring apparatus.

Pathogens Project

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when laboratory virus research came under a harsh spotlight, the Bulletin convened an expert task force comprising virologists, biosecurity professionals, and representatives of numerous other fields to examine the risks of pathogen research and come to recommendations to mitigate those. Several of the experts also wrote essays on the topic of making pathogen research safer.