The Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) in Geelong, Victoria, Australia is a high security laboratory, run by the CSIRO for exotic animal disease diagnosis and research. The lab is one of four Biosafety Level-4 labs in the country.
Geelong is a port city located on Corio Bay and the Barwon River, in the state of Victoria, Australia. Geelong is 75 kilometres (47 mi) south-west of the state capital, Melbourne. It is the second largest Victorian city, with an estimated urban population of 253,269 as of June 2016. Geelong runs from the plains of Lara in the north to the rolling hills of Waurn Ponds to the south, with Corio Bay to the east and hills to the west. Geelong is the administrative centre for the City of Greater Geelong municipality, which covers urban, rural and coastal areas surrounding the city, including the Bellarine Peninsula.
Victoria is a state in south-eastern Australia. Victoria is Australia's smallest mainland state and its second-most populous state overall, making it the most densely populated state overall. Most of its population lives concentrated in the area surrounding Port Phillip Bay, which includes the metropolitan area of its state capital and largest city, Melbourne, Australia's second-largest city. Victoria is bordered by Bass Strait and Tasmania to the south, New South Wales to the north, the Tasman Sea to the east, and South Australia to the west.
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country by total area. The neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and East Timor to the north; the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east. The population of 26 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, and its largest city is Sydney. The country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide.
It opened in 1985 costing $185 million, built on Corio Oval.[1]
Corio Oval was an Australian rules football ground, located in Geelong, Victoria and used by the Geelong Football Club in the VFA from 1878 to 1896 and the VFL from 1897 to 1940. Sited in Eastern Park, the oval was served by trams from 1930 when the line was extended along Ryrie Street to the football ground.
In November 2012 it delivered an experimental vaccine to help protect horses against the deadly Hendra virus.[2]
In 1977 Jim Peacock of the Australian Academy of Science asked Bill Snowdon, then Chief CSIRO AAHL if he could have the newly released USA NIH and the British equivalent requirements for the development of infrastructure for bio-containment reviewed by AAHL personnel with a view to recommending the adoption of one of them by Australian authorities. The review was carried out by CSIRO AAHL Project Manager Bill Curnow and CSIRO Engineer Arthur Jenkins. They drafted outcomes for each of the levels of security. AAHL was notionally classified as "substantially beyond P4". These were adopted by the Australian Academy of Science and became the basis for Australian Legislation.
The Australian Animal Health Laboratory was commissioned in 1985,[3] includes a number of laboratories and animal house facilities capable of operating at three steps of negative pressure below the lowest pressure within any part of the extramural wind-zone of the building exterior. External pressure and the cascaded negative pressure zones are measured and maintained in real time by electronic sensors, electronically controlled supply and exhaust air handling systems and purpose developed predictive logic controllers in support of management protocols to manage air locks, access and services to prevent loss or ingress of potentially contaminated gases, solids or liquids . Supply air is protected by two 0.001 HEPA filters in tandem, (series mounted) with appropriate pre-filters in purpose designed individual housings. Filters and housings in pairs are then mounted as multiples in parallel according to airflow and volume requirement. This configuration allows the de-contamination, testing and/or replacement of any individual filter without the need to shut down operation. For exhaust air, similar filtration hardware and management arrangements apply. However, at least one stage of exhaust protection of a method not relying on filtration is provided. In the case of AAHL, the system adopted by CSIRO was "air incineration" at 1000 C and a retention/dwell time of more than 4 seconds at that temperature. Liquid scrubbing to prevent escape of formaldehyde is fitted after the afterburner for protection of the environment. Waste liquids can be dosed chemically in steam jacketed stainless steel tanks as the first barrier, followed by heating under pressure and maintained at elevated temperature for an appropriate time. Multiple tanks can be configured in tandem or in parallel according to need.
AAHL was designed and built before there were any regulations covering bio-containment. The later regulations were written by AAHL personnel. AAHL Staff were at pains to ensure that AAHL could contain any known or yet to be discovered organism. Politically there was opposition to the notion of having the facility at all. The Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, although in favor of the project, threatened serious consequences for management if the design team "got it wrong".
Innovation in the design delivered cost savings of between $30M and $50M so the design team felt that it was better to err on the safe side than to face the prospect of an angry PM. AAHL was very cost effective and safe as a result.[citation needed] The Australian Animal Health Laboratory is a Class 4/ P4 Laboratory.
Filtration is any of various mechanical, physical or biological operations that separates solids from fluids by adding a medium through which only the fluid can pass. The fluid that passes through is called the filtrate. In physical filters oversize solids in the fluid are retained and in biological filters particulates are trapped and ingested and metabolites are retained and removed. However, the separation is not complete; solids will be contaminated with some fluid and filtrate will contain fine particles. Filtration occurs both in nature and in engineered systems; there are biological, geological, and industrial forms. For example, in animals, renal filtration removes waste from the blood, and in water treatment and sewage treatment, undesirable constituents are removed by absorption into a biological film grown on or in the filter medium, as in slow sand filtration.
A biosafety level is a set of biocontainment precautions required to isolate dangerous biological agents in an enclosed laboratory facility. The levels of containment range from the lowest biosafety level 1 (BSL-1) to the highest at level 4 (BSL-4). In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have specified these levels. In the European Union, the same biosafety levels are defined in a directive. In Canada the four levels are known as Containment Levels. Facilities with these designations are also sometimes given as P1 through P4, as in the term "P3 laboratory".
A biological hazard, or biohazard, is a biological substance that poses a threat to the health of living organisms, primarily humans. This could include a sample of a microorganism, virus or toxin that can affect human health. A biohazard could also be a substance harmful to other animals.
A fume hood is a type of local ventilation device that is designed to limit exposure to hazardous or toxic fumes, vapors or dusts.
Henipavirus is a genus of RNA viruses in the family Paramyxoviridae, order Mononegavirales containing five established species. Henipaviruses are naturally harboured by pteropid fruit bats and microbats of several species. Henipaviruses are characterised by long genomes and a wide host range. Their recent emergence as zoonotic pathogens capable of causing illness and death in domestic animals and humans is a cause of concern.
Sterilization refers to any process that eliminates, removes, kills, or deactivates all forms of life and other biological agents like prions present in a specific surface, object or fluid, for example food or biological culture media. Sterilization can be achieved through various means, including heat, chemicals, irradiation, high pressure, and filtration. Sterilization is distinct from disinfection, sanitization, and pasteurization, in that those methods reduce rather than eliminate all forms of life and biological agents present. After sterilization, an object is referred to as being sterile or aseptic.
A diving air compressor is a gas compressor that can provide breathing air directly to a surface-supplied diver, or fill diving cylinders with high-pressure air pure enough to be used as a breathing gas.
The National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) is part of the Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Branch of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), the agency of the Government of Canada that is responsible for public health, health emergency preparedness and response, and infectious and chronic disease control and prevention.
Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV) is a zoonotic virus closely related to the rabies virus. It was first identified in a 5-month-old juvenile black flying fox collected near Ballina in northern New South Wales, Australia, in January 1995 during a national surveillance program for the recently identified Hendra virus. ABLV is the seventh member of the genus Lyssavirus and the only Lyssavirus member present in Australia.
A diesel particulate filter (DPF) is a device designed to remove diesel particulate matter or soot from the exhaust gas of a diesel engine.
The concept of biocontainment is related to laboratory biosafety and pertains to microbiology laboratories in which the physical containment of pathogenic organisms or agents is required, usually by isolation in environmentally and biologically secure cabinets or rooms, to prevent accidental infection of workers or release into the surrounding community during scientific research. The term "biocontainment" was coined in 1985, but the concept stretches back at least to the 1940s.
Rotary vacuum filter drum consists of a drum rotating in a tub of liquid to be filtered.
Vacuum filtration is a fast filtration technique used to separate solids from liquids.
The Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health (CSCHAH) is an infectious disease laboratory complex in Winnipeg, Manitoba owned and operated by the Government of Canada. This modern facility is home to two laboratories: The Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease (NCFAD). It is the workplace of approximately 500 federal employees.
A hypoallergenic vacuum cleaner is a vacuum cleaner with filters designed to retain the vast majority of particles within the vacuum system. If successful this retention would greatly reduce the amount of potential allergens in the environment in which it is used. Regular vacuum cleaners are unable to retain most very fine dust and many allergens which simply are too small for the system to trap and are released from the system along with the exhaust air.
A biosafety cabinet (BSC)—also called a biological safety cabinet or microbiological safety cabinet—is an enclosed, ventilated laboratory workspace for safely working with materials contaminated with pathogens requiring a defined biosafety level. Several different types of BSC exist, differentiated by the degree of biocontainment required. BSCs first became commercially available in 1950.
The United States biological defense program—in recent years also called the National Biodefense Strategy—began as a small defensive effort that parallels the country's offensive biological weapons development and production program, active since 1943. Organizationally, the medical defense research effort was pursued first (1956-1969) by the U.S. Army Medical Unit (USAMU) and later, after publicly known discontinuation of the offensive program, by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Both of these units were located at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories were headquartered. The current mission is multi-agency, not exclusively military, and is purely to develop defensive measures against bio-agents, as opposed to the former bio-weapons development program.
The National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease (NCFAD), located in the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is part of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s National Centres for Animal Disease. NCFAD is co-located with the Public Health Agency of Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory.
Engineering controls are strategies designed to protect workers from hazardous conditions by placing a barrier between the worker and the hazard or by removing a hazardous substance through air ventilation. Engineering controls involve a physical change to the workplace itself, rather than relying on workers' behavior or requiring workers to wear protective clothing.
Engineering controls for nanomaterials are a set of hazard control methods and equipment for workers who interact with nanomaterials. Engineering controls are physical changes to the workplace that isolate workers from hazards, and are considered the most important set of methods for controlling the health and safety hazards of nanomaterials after systems and facilities have been designed.
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