Plague risks in Russia and a dangerous delay on WHO pandemic agreement | Letters

Responding to an editorial on a potential plague outbreak, Dr Darren Mann deplores delays to the agreement, while Kent Buse says Britain could do more Your editorial on the silence from Siberia after a worker died at a plague research institute there is right that the lack of information is the real worry ( The Guardian view on plague in Russia: what is most worrying is the lack of information, 18 October ).

But the deeper failure is not Russian. It is that, six years after Covid, we still have no agreed system for sharing pathogens, or for sharing what is made from them. I spent three decades in Hong Kong, through bird flu, Sars and Covid, working on outbreak surveillance and sample-sharing between Hong Kong and the UK. It is also where this territorial argument began. In June 1894, two bacteriologists arrived to investigate the plague.…