New International Initiatives on Enhancement of Biosafety and Biosecurity Regulations for Laboratories Handling Infectious Agents

Before we entered the era of antibiotics, development of antiseptics rules and reliable water purification systems the infectious pathogens had played a major role in morbidity and mortality of global human population. The advances in revealing the nature of dangerous infections and studying their causative agents during the recent years have led not only to big progress in their control but also to the study of their potential as weapons. During the last fifty years, several attempts have been made to use them for criminal or terrorist purposes that demonstrated that even primitively organized terrorist attacks may lead to quite significant consequences. The October 2001 events showed that bioterrorism attacks may be prepared, probably, as a result of theft of the pathogen from a lab. All this led to the revision and radical improvement of current national rules and international recommendations in the field of handling, storage and transportation of infectious agents. As a result, during the past two years these rules have been significantly revised by both the World Health Organization and some countries. However, their harmonization of is still far from what is desired. Therefore, biosafety professionals in some countries, including those of the European Union, are establishing professional biosafety associations. In addition, new initiatives are being proposed to develop internationally harmonized biosecurity rules to govern dangerous pathogens handling and storage. The most important of them are as follows: 1. Development, under the auspices of WHO, of new recommendations concerning a set of requirements to provide physical security of both biological agents and laboratories involved in research on extremely hazardous infections; 2. Enhacement, under the auspices of WHO, of current international recommendations on inventory procedures and regulations, inventory monitoring, and transportation of specimens and strains of extremely hazardous infections; 3. Establishing international associations of biosafety experts from different countries and regions in order to improve the international integration of efforts in this field and harmonization of said rules and regulations; 4. Continued development of international codes and rules of ethics for scientists and experts handling dangerous pathogens. In Russia these new initiatives were met with complete understanding, and some of them were considered as being extremely important. In particular, a decision was made to revise and enhance the current inventory procedures and regulations, those of inventory monitoring, and transportation of specimens and strains of extremely hazardous infections; and develop special additional regulatory documents in this area. At the same time, a significant amount of work should still be done to implement the above-mentioned proposals and approaches in biosafety and biosecurity taking into account the current situation in this field in Russia. (author)