Porton Down, one of the most secret scientific research centers in the United Kingdom, is clear about its objective: to stop the next pandemic in its tracks.
(Join our WhatsApp channel here and receive all the economic information from Colombia and the world).
After getting through the strict security checks at this remote facility, I was able to gain access to its scientists.
Porton Down’s headquarters are in the brand new Vaccine Evaluation and Development Centre.
Their work, focused on the covid response, aims to save lives and minimize the need for lockdowns when a new disease emerges.
“Covid, of course, is not something isolated,” says Professor Jenny Harries, executive director of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), which runs these laboratories.
“We say it was the biggest public health incident in a century, but I don’t think any of us think it will be another hundred years before the next one,” he adds.
He says that the combination of climate change, urbanization and people living near animals – sources of new diseases that can be transmitted to humans – causes a “rising tide of risk”.
Located in the quiet Wiltshire countryside near Salisbury, Porton Down is one of the few places in the world equipped to research some of the nastiest viruses and bacteria imaginable.
Freezers here contain disease-causing agents like Ebola.
One of its neighboring buildings is the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, part of the Ministry of Defence, where the use of the Novichok nerve agent was confirmed in the Salisbury poisoning of a Russian double spy and his daughter in 2018.
The vaccine laboratories, housed in dark green buildings, were hastily built as part of the emergency response to covid.
However, as the pandemic wore off, the focus changed.
The new vaccine research center focuses on three types of threats:
The goal is to collaborate with the pharmaceutical industry, scientists, and physicians to provide assistance at all stages of vaccine development.
Porton Down scientists are working on the first vaccine against Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, which is spread by ticks and kills about a third of infected people.
The disease has been detected in Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and Asia; and could spread further with climate change.
At the other end of the process, the efficacy of the vaccine is evaluated. It was the scientists from this place who detected that the omicron variant could circumvent part of the protection of the covid vaccines.
And new covid variants are still being researched by growing them in the lab, exposing them to antibodies taken from blood samples, and testing whether they can still infect.
Meanwhile, the machines, unofficially named Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, BB8, and Palpatine, make up the front line monitoring the threat of the world’s biggest outbreak of bird flu.
The H5N1 virus has devastated bird populations, and routine testing of bird workers has found the first asymptomatic cases in people in the UK.
The difference is that before the pandemic the teams here could only analyze 100 samples per week and now they exceed 3,000.
Work at this site focuses on the “100 Day Mission,” a hugely ambitious strategy to develop a vaccine against a new threat in just 100 days.
Designing and testing new vaccines has historically taken a decade. The unique circumstances of the pandemic allowed covid vaccines to be produced in one year, with the first doses arriving in December 2020.
Estimates suggest that these vaccines saved more than 14 million lives in the first 12 months they were used.
“Imagine if they had been available a bit earlier,” said Professor Isabel Oliver, UKHSA’s chief science officer.
“They started to be implemented more quickly than ever before in history, even though we could have saved many more lives and returned to a greater normalcy much faster.”
The hope here is that the lessons of the covid pandemic will allow us to be better prepared next time.
Professor Harries explains that in the past we have simply reacted to events, but in the future we must be at the forefront and “try to stop” any pandemic before it even starts.
And if a new disease occurs, he adds, we must “stop it in its tracks” at its earliest stage.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the latest version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
2023-08-21 00:31:14
#laboratory #face #unpredictable #disease
