Matters needing attention in the construction of biosafety laboratories

When laboratory personnel are dealing with pathogenic microorganisms, experimental materials containing pathogenic microorganisms or parasites, the laboratory and animal laboratory design is designed to ensure that the subjects do not pose biological hazards to humans, animals and plants, and to ensure that the surrounding environment is not contaminated. There are special requirements for construction. According to the degree of harm of the experimental object, the biosafety laboratory is generally divided into four levels, of which the first level has the lowest requirement for biosafety isolation and the fourth level is the highest. Levels 3 and 4 are high-level biosafety laboratories, sometimes referred to as biosafety cleanrooms, commonly referred to as P3 and P4 laboratories.

Laboratory grading:

The degree of hazard of the object being treated,

Level 1: It has low harm to human body, animals and plants or the environment, and does not have pathogenic factors for healthy adults, animals and plants.

Level 2: A virulence factor that is moderately hazardous or potentially hazardous to humans, animals, plants or the environment and does not pose a serious hazard to healthy adults, animals and the environment. There are effective preventive and therapeutic measures.

Level 3: Highly dangerous to humans, animals, plants or the environment. It is mainly caused by aerosols that cause serious or even fatal diseases, or pathogenic factors that are highly harmful to animals, plants and the environment. There are usually preventive and therapeutic measures.

Level 4: Highly dangerous to humans, animals, plants or the environment, through the aerosol route or through unknown or unknown, dangerous pathogenic factors. There are no preventive measures.

In recent years, especially after the SARS epidemic, many research institutes, institutions of higher learning, hospitals, commodity inspection and health and epidemic prevention departments have already built or are about to build biosafety laboratories. Due to the strong professionalism of the biosafety laboratory and the imperfect standardization standards in China, the construction party also lacks relevant experience, and some problems are inevitable in the construction. According to the author’s experience, some precautions are proposed for the reference of the owner, design unit and construction unit of the biosafety laboratory.

Economic aspects:

(1) For high-level biosafety laboratories, due to their high cost, it is not advisable to blindly build and avoid waste. Before setting up a biosafety laboratory, you should first have a thorough understanding of the main uses of the laboratory, basic performance indicators, and the purpose of building the laboratory. The level of the biosafety laboratory should be determined according to the hazard of the test subject, and the high level cannot be blindly pursued, because the higher the level, the higher the construction and operation costs.

(2) To balance the relationship between initial investment and operating expenses, you should not only pursue low initial investment, choose cheap equipment or simple system form, but ignore running costs and avoid the cost of building. The situation. The life cycle costing analysis method should be carried out during design, and a reasonable and economical design scheme should be selected after technical and economic analysis.