Newly-released access to information documents reveal details about a shipment of deadly pathogens last year from Canada’s National Microbiology Lab to China — confirming for the first time who sent them, what exactly was shipped, and where it went.
CBC News had alreadyreported about the shipmentof Ebola and Henipah viruses but there’s now confirmation one of the scientists escorted from the lab in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation last July was responsible for exporting the pathogens to the Wuhan Institute of Virology four months earlier.
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and her students from China were removed from Canada’s only level-4 lab on over what’s described as a possible “policy breach.” The Public Health Agency of Canada had asked the RCMP to get involved several months earlier.
The virus shipments are not related to the outbreak of COVID-19 or research into the pandemic, Canadian officials said.
PHAC said the shipment and the Qiu’s eviction from the lab are not connected.
“The administrative investigation is not related to the shipment of virus samples to China,” Eric Morrissette, chief of media relations for Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada wrote in an email.
“In response to a request from the Wuhan Institute of Virologyfor viral samples of Ebola and Henipah viruses, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) sent samples for the purpose of scientific research in 2019.”
‘It is alarming’
However, experts are concerned.
“It is suspicious. It is alarming. It is potentially life-threatening,” said Amir Attaran, a law professor and epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa.
WATCH | Deadly viruses were sent from Canada to China, documents show:
One of the scientists escorted from the National Microbiology Lab last year amidst an RCMP investigation was responsible for a shipment of Ebola and Henipah virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology four months earlier – although the Public Health Agency of Canada still maintains the two are not connected. 2:38
“We have a researcher who was removed by the RCMP from the highest security laboratory that Canada has for reasons that government is unwilling to disclose. The intelligence remains secret. But what we know is that before she was removed, she sent one of the deadliest viruses on Earth, and multiple varieties of it to maximize the genetic diversity and maximize what experimenters in China could do with it, to a laboratory in China that does dangerous gain of function experiments. And that has links to the Chinese military.”
Gain of function experiments are when a natural pathogen is taken into the lab, made to mutate, and then assessed to see if it has become more deadly or infectious.
Most countries, including Canada, don’t do these kinds of experiments — because they’re considered too dangerous, Attaran said.
“The Wuhan lab does them and we have now supplied them with Ebola and Nipah viruses. It does not take a genius to understand that this is an unwise decision,” he said.
“I am extremely unhappy to see that the Canadian government shared that genetic material.”
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu accepting an award at the Governor General’s Innovation Awards at a ceremony at Rideau Hall in 2018. Qiu is a prominent virologist who helped develop ZMapp, a treatment for the deadly Ebola virus which killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa between 2014-2016. (CBC)
Attaran pointed to an Ebola study first published in December 2018, three months after Qiu began the process of exporting the viruses to China. The study involved researchers from the NML and University of Manitoba.
The lead author, Hualei Wang, is involved with theAcademy of Military Medical Sciences, a Chinese military medical research institute in Beijing.
All of this has led to conspiracy theories linking the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, Canada’s microbiology lab, and the lab in Wuhan.
The RCMP and PHAC have consistently denied any connections between the pandemic and the virus shipments. There is no evidence linking this shipment to the spread of the coronavirus. Ebola is a filovirus and Henipa is a paramyxovirus; no coronavirus samples were sent.
Amir Attaran, professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa, is concerned about the shipment of dangerous viruses sent from Canada’s only level-4 lab to China. (CBC)
The ATIP documents identify for the first time exactly what was shipped to China.
The list includes two vials each of 15 strains of virus (about 15 ml):
Ebola Makona (three different varieties)
Mayinga.
Kikwit.
Ivory Coast.
Bundibugyo.
Sudan Boniface.
Sudan Gulu.
MA-Ebov.
GP-Ebov.
GP-Sudan.
Hendra.
Nipah Malaysia.
Nipah Bangladesh.
PHAC said the National Microbiology Lab routinely shares samples with other public public health labs.
The transfers follow strict protocols, including requirements under the Human Pathogens and Toxins Act (HPTA), theTransportation of Dangerous Goods Act, the Canadian Biosafety Standard, and standard operating procedures of the NML.
CBC News has not been provided with some of the paperwork involved with the transfer, which was redacted under sections of the Access to Information Act dealing with international affairs, national security and other issues.
Confusion, concern over shipment
The ATIP documents provide details about the months leading up to the shipment — including confusion over how to package the deadly viruses — the lack of decontamination of the package before it was sent, and concerns expressed by the NML’s director-general Matthew Gilmour in Winnipeg, and his superiors in Ottawa.
They wanted to know where the package was going, what was in it, and whether it had the proper paperwork.
In one email, Gilmour said Material Transfer Agreements would be required, “not generic ‘guarantees’ on the storage and usage.”
He also asked David Safronetz, chief of special pathogens: “Good to know that you trust this group. How did we get connected with them?”
Safronetz replied: “They are requesting material from us due to collaboration with Dr. Qiu.”
CBC News received hundreds of pages of documents through an Access to Information request, detailing a shipment of Ebola and Henipah viruses sent from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, to the Wuhan virology lab in China. (Karen Pauls/CBC News)
Meanwhile, it appears the NML’s shipper initially planned to send the viruses in inappropriate packaging and only changed it when the clients in China flagged the problem.
“The only reason the correct packaging was used is because the Chinese wrote to them and said, ‘Aren’t you making a mistake here?’ If that had not happened, the scientists would have placed on an Air Canada flight, several of them actually, a deadly virus incorrectly packaged. That nearly happened,” Attaran said.
The package was routed from Winnipeg to Toronto and then to Beijing on a commercial Air Canada flight on Mar. 31, 2019.
The next day, the recipients replied that the package had arrived safely.
“We would like to express our sincere gratitude to you all for your continuous support, especially Dr. Qiu and Anders! Thanks a lot!! Looking forward to our further cooperation in the future,” said the heavily-redacted email, which does not provide the name of the sender.
Access to information documents show a flurry of emails dealing with the shipment of viruses from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg to China. (John Woods/Canadian Press)
Nearly one year after the expulsion of Qiu, Cheng, and her students from the NML, there are still no updates on the case from the RCMP or PHAC.
At the time, Public Health Agency spokesperson Morrissette said the department was taking steps to resolve this case as quickly as possible.
On Thursday, he said the investigation has not yet concluded.
“Administrative investigations are impartial, thorough and in-depth. They are also procedurally fair and respect the rights of individuals,” he said.
Gordon Houlden, director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, said he welcomes scientific collaboration and exchanges with China, “but there has to be a framework of rules in place” and Canada’s intellectual property must be protected.
Houlden, a former diplomat, has many unanswered questions about this particular shipment.
Gordon Houlden, the director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, says there are many good reasons to share biological samples between labs, but any transfers must follow proper protocols. (Terry Reith/CBC)
A vacuum of information is always a problem, especially in a situation of heightened tension with China over the arrest of a Huawei executive in Canada, the seemingly retaliatory arrest of two Canadian men in China and questions over the origins of the coronavirus, he said.
“There’s also a danger if you don’t provide information that people will jump always to the worst conclusion,” Houlden said.
Current NML head Matthew Gilmour was not made available for an interview. He is leaving as of July to work for the U.K.-based Quadram Institute Bioscience. His medical adviser, Dr. Guillaume Poliquin, will take over until a permanent replacement can be found.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
