Poliovirus that infected a Chinese child in 2014 may have leaked from a lab, samples destined for destruction at a Paris institute trigger a virological “detective story”.

Researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris working under strict biosafety conditions recently opened an old box that contained a virological time capsule: four poliovirus samples, each with a handwritten label on the vial, sent to the institute more than 60 years earlier by Albert Sabin, a giant in the field of poliovirus research. The viruses had to be destroyed, as part of a global campaign to get rid of old poliovirus samples. But first, the Pasteur team would sequence them to preserve their genetic information. A paper about those sequences, published in Virus Evolutionin July, has raised an unexpected and troubling possibility: A poliovirus that infected a 4-year old child in China in 2014 may have originated in a research laboratory or a vaccine production facility.

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Poliovirus that infected a Chinese child in 2014 may have leaked from a lab