The risk from Security Sensitive Biological Agents (SSBAs) and the need for response

Abstract

In 2011, the International Health Regulations Review Committee of the WHO suggested ‘The world is ill-prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global, sustained and threatening public-health emergency’. This was presumably partly in response to known threats that had occurred over the previous decade – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003,H1N1 pandemic influenza in 2009, avian influenza H5N1 in 2004, and predated outbreaks with Zikavirus (2015–2016), Ebolavirus (2014), and most recently SARS CoV2, the causative agent of COVID-19 (2020).