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By IAN BIRRELL 
12m ago
London: One of China’s leading biosafety experts admitted that there are widespread deficiencies in safety and maintenance in his country’s most secret labs working with lethal diseases.
Yuan Zhiming, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and head of its biosecurity committee, highlighted serious concerns in an article published eight months ago.
“Most labs lack biosecurity managers and engineers,” he wrote in the Journal of Biosafety And Biosecurity, confessing that this left part-time researchers to complete the work of “qualified personnel” in high-security labs. .
“This makes it difficult to identify and mitigate potential security risks in the operation of facilities and equipment early enough,” he added.
Professor Yuan, the highest-ranking Communist Party official in the Wuhan laboratory, was used to respond last week to “malicious” claims that the pandemic originated at his institute.
However, he wrote that “the cost of maintenance is generally neglected” in his article last September, adding that due to “limited resources,” the supposedly safe labs “operate with extremely minimal operating costs, or in some cases, none “
The surprising admission, in an article titled “Current Status and Future Challenges of High-Level Biosafety Laboratories in China,” will raise concerns that the new coronavirus may have leaked from one of the two laboratories in Wuhan.
In a second article in the magazine, which he co-authored with four colleagues in Wuhan, he agreed that “the biosecurity system needs to be improved and strengthened.”
Professor Yuan’s lab, ten miles from the infamous wildlife market, considered the source of the outbreak, was designed with French help. It was the first lab in China with level 4, which is intended to be the safest in the world.
Scientists at the institute discovered that the virus’s genome was 96 percent similar to that commonly found in bats.
Last month, The Mail on Sunday released an image from the lab showing a broken seal on the door of one of the refrigerators used to hold 1,500 strains of the virus.
A second laboratory in the city at the center of the pandemic outbreak at the end of last year, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, is also believed to have conducted experiments on animals such as bats to examine coronavirus transmission, though it only has the Level 2 .
Professor Yuan’s article said “several high-level BSLs [biosafety laboratories] they do not have sufficient operating funds for routine but vital processes. “Last week, the scientist, in response to information from Donald Trump that the United States was investigating to see if Covid-19 originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, said that the rumors were “out of the blue”.
Mail on Sunday
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