Lack of compliance with
biosafety and biosecurity protocols in academic and healthcare institutions is
the top ranking health security concern today. A little breach of protocol
while working with deadly pathogens put the whole system at risk. Biosafety is
personal safety and protection from dangerous biological agents, while
biosecurity is restricting unauthorized access to harmful biological agents. In
other words, biosafety is to protect ourselves from germs while biosecurity is
to protect germs from people. In either case, protective and monitoring
measures are extremely crucial in the working environment where pathogens are
found.
It has been
observed as a common practice in the healthcare institutions that healthcare
workers in the hospitals do not comply with SOPs while managing patients.
Proper and necessary infection control precautions are not followed in touching
patients, changing gloves between patients, touching the beds, bed sheets, and
bedside equipment in hospitals. The healthcare workers do not really care about
it. This practice could partly be because of lack of basic necessary knowledge,
underestimating or not realizing the possible threats, or lack of necessary
hospital resources with the staff. In either ways, the consequences are
extremely threatening and the germs dissemination poses a consistent threat to
humanity. Same malpractice is seen in the laboratories in the academic
institutions. Students experimenting with deadly pathogens do not strictly
comply with the safety protocols. Even the donning and doffing of gloves and
coats are not properly followed. This practice not only risks their own lives
but they also help spread the pathogens in the environment thereby risking the
very lives of the entire community. Infectious diseases
are considered the greatest health security threat today, and are been widely
predicted as the leading cause of deaths in the near future. Thus there is an
urgent need of the day to make policies that not only define the Principles,
Practice and Protocols (PPP) for biosafety and biosecurity but such protocols
should be legally binding too.
One of the
obvious issues in working with pathogens or lack of compliance to any SOPs, in
general, is that the policies that define such practices are not legally
binding. There should be strict legislations in this regard. And to implement
and ensure sustainability of the policies, every institution must establish an
Institutional Biosafety and Biosecurity Monitoring Department (IBMD). Few of
the developed countries have ensured that all institutions working with
hazardous or potentially hazardous substances to the public health and
environment must have institutional review boards to check the working
environment in the laboratory for compliance with safety protocols so that
environmental health and safety is guaranteed. However, majority of the
developing countries do not have any such infrastructure and that is very
devastating because infectious agents respect no boundaries. A biothreat in a
small unit in an isolated place in a healthcare or academic institution is a
threat to the whole community, and to the entire population at large.
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