Safe and secure biomaterials: a risk-based alternative approach

The global burden of infectious disease outbreaks is increasingly recognized. In order to build capacity for diagnosis, laboratories have been built and are in use worldwide. Laboratory safety standards vary significantly between the developed and the developing world, and it is unclear whether it is imperative for global health protection that all countries reach the standards demanded in the most developed countries, as is the opinion of many. It is doubtful that such an approach is sustainable. Sufficient biosafety and biosecurity levels can be reached with a more context-sensitive risk-based approach and a smarter use of existing resources. The concept of safety and security draws on an understanding of risks that reflects a contextsensitive process. This relative risk could be a useful starting point for regulators and policy-makers to rethink their current approach to biosafety and biosecurity in a globalized world. Rather than defining standards as universal endpoints, they could then adopt the alternative method of establishing and maintaining a productive discourse to relate risks to local settings...