Posted on 4/30/2020
What goes in, must not come out - and must also not cause harm to anyone working inside the lab. That's perhaps a nice way of summing up "laboratory safety" in one sentence - at least wherever pathogens are handled in biological and medical settings. The necessary laboratory safety precautions primarily depend on what is waiting "inside".
Many pathogens have caused a major uproar in recent years. In the past, the Zika virus, EHEC, SARS, MERS and right now SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus have emerged as new pathogens that infect humans and have been recognized as having animal origin. Others, including Ebola, measles, various influenza (flu) viruses or Marburg virus, have been around for a long time and continue to...