Marc Lipsitch1, Thomas V Inglesby2. 1. Department of Epidemiology, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA mlipsitc@hsph.harvard.edu tinglesby@upmc.edu. 2. UPMC Center for Health Security, Baltimore, Maryland, USA mlipsitc@hsph.harvard.edu tinglesby@upmc.edu.
Volume 5, no. 6, doi:10.1128/mBio.02366-14, 2014. On page 2 (PDF), the seventh paragraph of the section headed “Risk Analysis” should read as follows: Putting all these numbers together, the select agent data suggest that a laboratory-year of experimentation on virulent, transmissible influenza virus might have an 0.01% to 0.1% chance of killing 20 million to 1.6 billion, or an expected death toll of 2,000 to 1.6 million fatalities per BSL3-laboratory-year. From the NIAID data, for each full-time person-year of BSL-3 work, we might expect a toll of between 8,000 and 10 million.