Now let us just turn our attention for just a few minutes to laboratory animal biosafety. I do not want to forget about this aspect. We have talked a lot about working with pathogens in the laboratory, but what about working with animals and animal pathogens. Everything from fish, mice, guinea pigs, non-human primates, goats, sheep, and cows. There is a lot of different animals that are being used in research and a lot of different animal pathogens. Some are zoonotic, which means they can infect you as well. There are a lot of additional and special issues that come with animal biorisk management that are not addressed with human pathogen biorisk management. We will discuss animal biorisk management in detail in a later module.

To illustrate the differences between animal and human biosafety, we will just look at this simple graphic here. You see here three different viruses. Filovirus, like Ebola have a great human health concern, but very little animal health concern. Apthoviruses, like foot and mouth disease, do not infect humans at all, but have a high animal health concern. Completely opposite to Ebola. Finally, Morbiolliviruses, like Nipha virus have very high human and animal health concern. Therefore, the risk varies depending upon which pathogen you are working with and how it affects people and animals. The risk assessment should inform you as to the nature of the risk and therefore what kind of controls you might need to work safely with those different pathogens. 

Animal biosafety levels are very similar to the human biosafety levels. There are risk groups, 1-4 but they are different than the human risk groups, because they now must address both the animal health concerns and the human health concerns. The containment levels are now called animal biosafety levels (ABSLs), 1-4. As you can see, they are like the human biosafety levels, where ABSL1 has few protections needed all the way up to ABSL4, which uses very high containment practices and procedures, highly engineered caging and rooms, and a lot of safety equipment for work with the most dangerous animal pathogens. So, even though there are a lot of parallels between human health biorisk management and animal health biorisk management, there are some major differences.

Finally let’s look at program management and monitoring. When implementing biosafety there are a lot of guidance documents available in the world. The Canadian guidelines, the U.S. guidelines, the WHO guidelines, and several others from different countries including Australia, Japan, Korea, and others. There are many similarities and overlaps between them, as you would expect, so they are not all that different. Every country should have their own guidelines, however if not available these other documents are a good starting place.

Please keep in mind that the biosafety guidelines are mainly performance based. In other words, they do not tell you exactly what to do, but they define the result. How you achieve that result is left up to you and your team. That is good, because it accommodates the ever-changing approaches to containment and your local situation. This allows you to be flexible, but really relies upon you to do a thorough risk assessment. Therefore, it is very important to do the final part of biorisk management and monitor how well risk is being mitigated. Be sure to implement a regular method of inspections, audits, and training. Document everything that you find to look for trends and establish baselines.

Finally, in summary, I want to remind you that there are the four primary routes of exposure through or which you can get infected. These are oral, mucus membranes, respiratory and percutaneous. We use biosafety techniques, safety equipment and facility design to help block those routes of infection. The three primary categories of controls we discussed are – practices and techniques (what you do), safety equipment and primary barriers (the kind of engineering controls that you use and the PPE you wear) and finally facility design. They combine in different ways to create various levels of biorisk mitigation or biosafety levels. Even though four discrete levels have been described (BSL 1-4) keep in mind those levels are not absolute, but a continuum. You can have levels in between as needed based upon the risk assessment. There are four animal biosafety levels, but they are not the same as human biosafety levels. There are different concerns when it comes to animal biorisk management. Not just from the animal risks themselves, but also from the animal pathogens. Biosafety guidelines from around the world are all performance based. They do not tell you exactly how to do things, but they do give you a guideline and some outcomes to work towards. Remember to audit and assess your biorisk program regularly to look for trends and make changes as needed.

Thank you again for taking this overview of biosafety. When you teaching biosafety, this is a good introduction to the concepts. Please take the quiz to remind yourself of the important concepts covered. Thank you again and we will see you all in the next module.