11mo ago

First biolab in South America for studying world’s deadliest viruses is set to open

www.nature.com

23 comments

This has all the makings of a bad zombie movie.
- Except for the zombie part. Itll.just be truckloads of corpses. Again.
Oh boy I can't wait for the non-racist comments implying the poors will endanger the world
- I have no idea how this lab will operate, but these types of labs are often used by government agencies whose own countries have prohibited certain types of extremely dangerous and risky research.
  There's actually a lot of good circumstantial evidence that the really big Ebola outbreak some years ago likely originated from a lab in neighboring country, that was being used by US government funded scientists, doing work that they were not legally allowed to do on US soil.
  It's late and I'm tired so I am not going to dig up the reporting on that, but there has been some great coverage on the topic in the few years that it's worth reading up on.
  Whether or not any of that has any relevance to this specific laboratory, or how they'll operate, I have no idea. Just pointing out that whatever upside can be gained by this type of research, is also accompanied by serious risks.
  
  I can’t find any evidence for this.
Good, we need more BSL4 labs. The more we cut down forests and push into remote areas where bacteria, viruses, and fungi have always been endemic, the more we risk a catastrophic spillover event that will be magnified by rapid, worldwide flights and climate change making animals and diseases more present around humans. Fungi, for example, are thriving in warmer and wetter winters. We must be hypervigilant about new and evolving diseases, especially ones that might not yet have vaccines developed for them.
These labs will keep churning out research even in the event of catastrophic calamity in areas were most of our BSL4 labs reside (Europe, and North America).
- The crowd blights are what scare me. Some fungus or other microorganism previously thriving within its niche suddenly spills out into conditions that ensure its unchecked spread, and it causes mass die-offs among our monocultured food supply.
Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with this.
Can't wait for people to blame it for the next outbreak.
"It came from the same area as the lab!" "Where would you put a lab designed to look for these kinds of things?" "U so dumb."
- Inb4 people start calling it a DEI lab

23 comments