Turning now to reason, number four – preventing contamination of the work product in the lab or in the animal house.

Contamination of the work product could occur if there is escape of pathogens from the containment system you are using – for example from your culture dish. Loss of containment can lead to contamination of your hands, feet or air which then leads to contamination of other work spaces or products. This can then lead to repeated diagnostic work when the controls show that something went wrong and you find out that you have a false positive or false negative result. Or, if you’re doing research you may have to repeat the study which could incur extra costs. When these events occur, it indicates a lack of quality assurance and quality management. Good biorisk management is part of doing good quality work. Finally, this can all lead to a lack of confidence by your management and government. Prevention of contamination of the work product and spaces is a very important aspect of biorisk management and quality control.

So finally, reason number five. Which relates back to the others – ensuring that the public has the highest faith and trust in your work. It’s all about keeping your job. If biorisk management fails and you become contaminated or sick at your workplace, if viruses or bacteria are accidently released and contaminate something outside of the workplace (outside your laboratory) or you have poor results being reported, these all potentially lead to a lack of trust and faith from the public. This may then result in a potential work stoppage.

In this example from the news media, scientists from a biosafety panel recommended firing staff at the US CDC when a bird flu incident was revealed. In this incident, CDC scientists had contaminated an avirulent bird flu strain with a more aggressive strain that killed laboratory chickens. After an extensive investigation into the incident a lot of people lost their jobs. The public lost trust in the CDC.

In another example, research was stopped at the US Army Medical Research Institute over biosafety issues, as shown in this news clipping. This clearly shown that when the community finds out work is not being done safely, it can be stopped and staff will have to face the consequences. Therefore, it’s very, very important to do all the things you are going to be learning in this course about biorisk management properly and correctly.

So in review. Lack of good biorisk management can lead to poor quality work, potential contamination and lack of public trust. People lose their jobs over poor work and your institution or country can be embarrassed or disgraced by these errors. That’s really one of the major reasons you’re here – to learn more about biorisk management to ensure this doesn’t happen to you. We want you to do good quality work and we want you to be safe. 

Finally, I’ll leave you with this from the World Health Organization. They said “It is the technical and moral duty of laboratory managers and laboratory workers to reassure the general public and to prove that biorisks inherent to the laboratory work are controlled with appropriate safeguards to meet their expectations”. I think this is a really nice statement that summarizes everything that we’re going to be talking about and you’re going to try and do, when it comes to biorisk management.

I thank you for taking this first module and look forward to seeing you in the next several modules on biorisk management.