Testing for highly-infectious pathogens will now be possible within the State as the government is set to upgrade the bio-safety level of one of its labs.
Currently, the Institute of Preventive Medicine (IPM), a public facility, performs tests in a Bio-Safety Level 2 lab. To work with potentially lethally disease-causing pathogens, which spread through inhalation, the government has decided to upgrade IPM’s BSL to level 3.
“Proposal worth ₹ 1.5 crore to upgrade the BSL of the existing lab from 2 to 3 is being sent to the government. This will enhance the State’s public testing capabilities,” said Dr. Shankar, in-charge director of the IPM. The BSL-3 testing facility can be used for testing and research work with infectious agents like the mycobacterium tuberculosis, SARS and other corona viruses.
Often, staff working in a BSL 3 lab are inoculated or vaccinated against pathogens they work on. Laboratory personnel from the State’s hospitals were trained in the past to work in BSL 3 facilities, which will come handy when IPM’s lab is upgraded, Dr. Shankar added.
Work with exotic and potentially fatal infectious agents, without a defined treatment protocol or vaccination, is done in BSL-4 laboratories. National Institute of Virology has the only BSL-4 facility in the country’s public health sector. Testing and research on Ebola, Nipah, and other pathogens causing haemorrhagic fevers is done at such facilities across the world.
BSL-4 labs are often isolated facilities with dedicated air and exhaust, besides dedicated effluent treatment. Staff in such labs are required to work in positive-pressure suits. A proposal to set up a BSL 4 facility on the premises of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad was mooted more than a decade ago, but later abandoned as the high cost of investment in the context of scientific work at CCMB, seemed financially unviable, sources said. CCMB operates multiple BSL 3 labs.
