【病毒外文文献】2007 Editorial on Laboratory-Acquired Incidents in Taipei, Taiwan and Singapore following the Outbreak of SARS Coronavir

17 A novel emerging disease caused by the SARS coro navirus insidiously crept into the Asia Pacific region be ginning in November in 2002 in Guangdong China then unrecognised as SARS This was retrospectively diag nosed and spread to Hong Kong and from there to Viet nam Singapore Canada and Taiwan in February and March 2003 Heroic efforts to contain the outbreak in each country led to these countries in turn being declared SARS free by the WHO Taiwan being the last country infected with the last known case having been detected on 15 June 2003 was declared SARS free in July 2003 However this was only the end of the human to human transmission of SARS What came next was a series of laboratory acquired infections in laboratory staff sequen tially in Singapore September 2003 Taipei Taiwan December 2003 and Beijing China December 2003 January 2004 The genie had been let out of the box inadvertently and made these countries realize they had a laboratory biosafety crisis The events in the laboratory in Taiwan and Singa pore have been submitted to this journal and will be presented in this quarter Taiwan and next quarter Singapore Events leading to the incidents and the sig nificance of the events will be recounted From the bio safety perspective this was a unique opportunity to de velop national and local biosafety standards with full sup port from the authorities Together they successfully worked to minimize the outbreak that not only led to health issues but economic and emotional turmoil in the region In all three countries affected national standards or legislation has been implemented and a flurry of activ ity to build high containment facilities has begun These measures have gone hand in hand with training commu nication a determination to follow best procedures transparent incident reporting and good medical surveil lance There was a lack in many of these areas that led to the laboratory incidents The lessons learned from these incidents which happened in high containment laborato ries BSL 3 in Singapore and BSL 4 in Taiwan only un derline the importance of the human aspects of any good biosafety program One can not rely on good engineering and facilities although the Singapore laboratory was eventually downgraded to a BSL 2 laboratory Retrospec tively it was indeed fortunate that in both cases the infec tions were confined to a single laboratory worker in ques tion This was not the case in the Beijing incident where 13 cases were reported in total to have been connected to the use of a BSL 2 laboratory with community spread One other thing to note is that a BSL 2 BSL 3 and BSL 4 laboratory was involved in each case and that every one of the laboratory staff involved in the incident were re search workers No diagnostic laboratory has reported any laboratory incidents involving SARS coronavirus This shows that it is not so much the secondary engineering in the containment facility though important which is of paramount importance but that proper biosafety manage ment and more stringent oversight especially of the re search community is required The one good thing that came out of these unfortunate incidents is that lessons learned from them have bolstered national local and individual efforts to improve the situation and a much healthier biosafety culture will be the result These inci dents therefore have been chronicled to encourage other laboratories not affected to have a critical look at their biosafety culture and biosafety measures in place and to do it in a timely way to prevent more unnecessary inci dents like these from occurring Applied Biosafety 12 1 p 17 ABSA 2007 Article Editorial on Laboratory Acquired Incidents in Taipei Taiwan and Singapore Following the Outbreak of SARS Coronavirus Ai Ee Ling Singapore General Hospital Singapore