Complementing Biosafety Levels With Societal Safety Levels

Societal Safety Levels (SSLs) based on expected public fatalities per year would require marked safety improvements for replication-competent potential pandemic pathogen research under a 0.1 deaths/facility-year threshold.

• Why it matters: Current biosafety level (BSL) categories reduce lab occupational risk but largely ignore onward transmission to the public, leaving consent and societal harm mismatched.
• What they did: The authors formalize SSLs by estimating expected fatalities from laboratory release probability, likelihood of societal transmission, and consequence, applying them to replication-competent potential pandemic pathogen research.
• The result: Using a standard 0.1 expected deaths per facility-year common across major-hazard industries implies higher containment than current BSLs for such research, enabling enforceable accident-safety thresholds aligned with other industries.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.