The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the White House are currently reconsidering existing policy to manage “dual use research of concern” and research that would enhance potential pandemic pathogens, with expected new guidance in January. 

As biotechnology has advanced with remarkable speed and impact, so have the needs and demands for benefits, along with concerns about risks. Policy for managing these tradeoffs and mitigating risks has not kept up.

Today, two researchers at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, David Relman and Megan Palmer, are among the co-authors on a Policy Forum article that appears in Science magazine, entitled “Strengthen Oversight of Risky Research on Pathogens.”

The article calls for a series of specific measures to enhance U.S. policy and spur the development of policy elsewhere in the world to address the serious gaps and challenges of the current guidance framework.

The recommendations include:

• The ‘dual use research of concern’ (DURC) framework should apply to all human pathogens, not just the 15 agents currently listed.
• Improved review processes must evaluate the risk and potential consequences of accidents, theft or insider diversions.
• Research proposals should be required to go through independent, government-led risk–benefit assessments to determine whether the work should proceed and under what conditions.
• The U.S. government should seek nongovernmental expertise for the review process. Currently, the HHS process involves only governmental experts, and the identity of these individuals is not publicly available.
• All U.S. agencies and institutions that fund work related to the enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens should have that work evaluated under the revised enhanced potential pandemic pathogens framework.

In addition to Relman and Palmer, the other co-authors are Jassi Pannu, Anita Cicero, and Tom Inglesby at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and Marc Lipsitch at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“It is vital to get these policies right, not only for the US, but to inspire policy development in other countries with growing life science and biotechnology sectors,” write the authors. “Few countries have policies that fully manage these issues.”

Media Contact: Ari Chasnoff, Associate Director for Communications, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world, having suffered years of civil war and regional conflict. Its human development indicators rank 175 out of 189 countries on the 2019 Human Development Index. The child malnutrition rate is 15% among 5-year-olds and younger and many Liberians lack access to basic needs such as food, water, shelter, education, and health care.

In fact, the authors note, nearly 63% of the people in the West African nation established by freed American slaves live in poverty; 69% of the country’s 5 million people live on less than $3.20 a day.

“A functional economy that ensures that most citizens can earn a living wage does not exist,” the authors wrote. “Extreme poverty in some families, high levels of illiteracy and unemployment, and suboptimal economic activities contribute to child servitude and other forms of child exploitation.”

The children of Liberia are not alone. In societies with inherent instability and ongoing conflict, the practice of child servitude can become accepted as a normal way to make money and centralize power when opportunity and resources are scarce.

Jappah notes that for young children and adolescents, this is the period of forming personality, critical reasoning and developing relationships outside of the home, as well as forming opinions about the world around them. Living in such dehumanizing conditions can result in shame and trauma and often have intergenerational effects. They also have lower levels of education and higher dropout rates, contributing to an ongoing cycle of intergenerational poverty.

“These children, as all children do, internalize and, to some extent, normalize their living conditions, and society becomes more acquiescent to such practices, despite their detrimental effects,” Jappah said.  “These practices are widespread in places where laws are not adequate to address them, or if there are laws, few enforcement mechanisms are in place, or they are not enforced.”

Jappah said Liberians must address their cultural history of exploitation if they want to abolish the practice of child servitude. In addition, addressing the larger issues of inequity and the exclusion of marginalized groups is necessary.

“Throughout human history, we have witnessed clashes among social classes and groups,” Jappah said. “The more inequitable a society is, the more likely it is to be rife with social tensions.”

He concluded that those tensions are evident in developing countries as well as the industrialized nations such as the United States, a Western harbor of child trafficking and slavery. According to the Global Slavery Index, on any given day in 2016 there were 403,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in the United States — or 1.3 victims of slavery for every thousand people in this country.

 “This phenomenon is universal; Liberia is not an exception,” Jappah said.