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. Kitasato Shibasaburō was given lab space and immediate access to the bodies. Alexandre Yersin was refused access to the dead, and worked from a straw hut, having to appeal to the governor for his share of cadavers. Access to the material was allocated by favour, not by need. The organism carries the name of the man who was shut out: Yersinia pestis.
