Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

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Researchers in China recently reported in a journal that a new bat coronavirus has the potential to spread to humans. While the finding

was important, other scientists expressed concern about how the research was done. In this episode,

Johns Hopkins virologist, Dr. Andy Peckosch, returns to the podcast to talk with Stephanie Desmond

about how biosafety standards for labs vary around the world

and what that could mean for studying future viruses with pandemic potential.

Let's listen.

Andy Peckosch, thanks so much for joining me.

Oh, as always, my pleasure.

In March, some researchers from Wuhan, China, published in the journal

Cell that they had been working with a bat virus, so H-KU-5 coronavirus, and they were discovered

that it could spread to humans. And so, of course, this raised concerns about,

could this be a new pandemic? But really, when I asked you about it, you said, that's not really

the question. Yeah. The real question there was, this kind of work goes on a lot, right? I mean,

we want to get some sense of out of the thousands of viruses that are out

there in other animal species, what percentage of them are close to being able to infect humans,

right? And so this study characterized HQ5, a couple of other viruses for their ability to infect

human cells and show that, yeah, in fact, these viruses were able to do a quite good job at infecting cells. The problem with the study was in how they

did their experiments. Those kind of experiments here in the U.S. would be what we call

...