News

Although not directly biosafety related, the review article on academic lab safety published in Nature Chemistry may be of interest. We would like to quote the following paragraph from the article, which, we believe, very nicely summarises challenges also found within our field:

"The benefits of establishing academic lab safety research programmes
would be substantial. Ultimately, the goal would be to decrease the rate and severity of accidents in academic labs, ensure that lab personnel stay safe and healthy, and that equipment, laboratory and buildings are protected. This is also likely to have a spillover effect into industry — better-trained, more safety-conscious students would make better industrial employees. Undoubtedly, there would be financial savings related to the cost of accidents, insurance rates and lawsuits."

For more details, please see the following link.

For further details, please click here.

The World Health Organization commemorated the 40th anniversary of smallpox eradication today, recognizing the historic moment on 9 December 1979 when the end of smallpox was confirmed to have been eradicated. Five months later, in May 1980, the 33rd World Health Assembly issued its official declaration that ‘the world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox’.

Please see the following link for more information.

German LabConCert in collaboration with HT Lab Tec GmbH offers another webinar in their series entitled "System solutions for critical rooms in hospitals and laboratories". The webinar slated for December 12th 2019 will be presented by Claus Schweinheim who will discuss tightness requirements and test methods for different room types. Please see the following links for further details:

German

English

The following article may go back a few years, but is still relevant as it looks at concentration, size distribution and infectivity of airbourne particles, in particular those carrying swine viruses.

Article

The Global Laboratory Initiative (GLI) is pleased to announce the launch of the TB laboratory safety handbook. This tool was launched on the margins of the 50^th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Hyderabad earlier this week. This Handbook draws on decades of experience working in culture and DST laboratories. It focuses on how to work safely in order to reduce the risk of infection or injury and protect the laboratory workforce and the wider community against unintentional exposures or releases of pathogenic biological agents.

Factors that have led to potential and confirmed exposures to biological agents include absence or improper use of personal protective equipment, inadequate or ignored risk assessments, lack of standard operating procedures, and/or insufficiently trained personnel. 

The intended audience of this Handbook is laboratory staff who conduct procedures to test samples potentially containing Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

The handbook may be downloaded here.

The SwissErgo annual conference will take place on November 29th 2019 on the topic of flexibility at work and its relationships with employees' health and performance.

The program is available now.

Interested persons can register via https://swissergo.ch

Through the Science for Peace and Security Programme, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) convened an Advanced Research Workshop to explore the core questions of biosecurity for synthetic biology. The workshop was co-organised by EPFL (International Risk Governance Center)
and the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, and hosted by EPFL.

The meeting report may be downloaded here.

An explosion has caused a fire at a Russian biological research facility that's one of only 2 centers in the world known for housing samples of the smallpox virus.

More details may be found here.

The Public Health Agency of Canada’s Centre for Biosecurity is mandated to prevent, detect and respond to public health risks posed by the use of human pathogens and toxins in Canada. The Centre for Biosecurity oversees activities conducted under the Human Pathogens and Toxins Act (HPTA) and the Human Pathogens and Toxins Regulations (HPTR). In December 2015, the Centre for Biosecurity established a national surveillance system, the Laboratory Incident Notification Canada (LINC), for the mandatory reporting of laboratory incidents involving human pathogens and toxins. 

The most recent data has just been published by the Canadian authorities and may be downloaded here.