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It is important to perform decontamination before annual certification, filter change, maintenance work, or relocation. This is crucial to ensure the safety of the technician changing the filters. Any biological material handled in the Biological Safety Cabinet (BSC) ends up in the plenum, located at the top of the cabinet. While the end-users can clean the BSC work surface with an approved disinfectant, they cannot clean the plenum. This is where gaseous decontamination plays a vital role. Gaseous decontamination reaches and inactivates the microbial pathogens and spores present in the plenum of the cabinet and the High-Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filter.

Date: 1st of January 2024

Author: Brett Cole and Verity Cox

The new Australian Government Office, Department of Health and Aged Care – Office of Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) Physical Containment Level 3 Guidelines (OGTR) came into effect on 1^st December 2022. The Guidelines cover many aspects of the Licensing of a High Containment Facility Level 3 and serve as great guidance documents for those facilities that are undergoing licensing for the first time, those continuing under an existing license or those changing or modifying their license conditions. The Guidelines have appended guidelines for Animal and Invertebrate facilities.

Date: 6th of December 2022

Author: Brett Cole and Cameron Welch 

Sending immunocompromised people back into at-risk environments such as aged care and you're thinking of fogging it, you need to be aware of the chemical residues and things that may be left from the fogging process, as well as the disinfection process. Even if you're not fogging, we've had many questions around these disinfectants that claim longevity.

Author: Brett Cole

IBEC was established as a Consortium of Professionals and Academics from different disciplines. The ideology was to bridge the gap between proven scientific processes and real-world applications. IBEC programs educate how to successfully mitigate transmission while educating the masses on safe protocols that make a difference in stifling the unnecessary increase of numbers of COVID-19 cases. IBEC coordinate knowledge and information sharing, including standards, policies and procedures applied to impact the modes of transmission in built spaces. Collective data into practice by transitioning research into practice to recover from biological incidents and safely return to routine activities.

Author: Brett Cole

Laboratories process a vast amount of air. In fact, they are amongst the biggest energy consumers in research buildings, with air changes that can be up to 5-20 air changes per hour (all the air in the room, is swapped for new air, that many times). This causes high load on climate control systems, filtration units and mechanical infrastructure. The air that is drawn into the laboratories, will come from a plant room and air intakes, often this is far from the laboratory and connected through a series of ducts.

Author: Allan Heckenberg, PhD 

Brett Cole, managing director of Biosafety International, presented to the Noble Park Probus Club, retired or semi-retired people from all walks of life. With great discussion on COVID-19, the effects, ongoing issues and how Biosafety International processes a "hot site" for COVID-19 or other dangerous pathogens. With insight on how both the Astrazeneca and Pfizer vaccines are manufactured. Biosafety has experience with the decontamination of vaccine manufacturing with international trips to the United Kingdom earlier this year.

Author: Verity Cox

PRI and credible EDS system manufacturers, pride themselves on building reliability in the systems for the maximum possible uptime and service life. As such, component failures are relatively rare. So why go to the time and expense of pre-emptive service calls?     

Critical systems cannot be allowed to fail. EDS systems protect staff and those outside the facility from potentially very harmful release outcomes. A single point of failure in the system, may put that protection at risk. In some cases, these breaches can result in notifications to the OGTR regulators. Given that any down-time on the system will cause disruption to the workflow of laboratories or facilities connected to the system, failures need to be swiftly addressed.

Author: Allan Heckenberg Ph.D.

An abundance of caution leads us to always consider at least three possible transmission routes for viral disease – via the air, contact with solid surfaces and personal contact with other humans or animal vectors. While our current understanding is that air is a predominant factor in SARS COV 2, surface interactions are still likely enough to demand stringent protection against this transmission method. If simple, low-cost precautions to avoid the lower order risks are available, they are worthy of consideration-for instance, mosquito-born transmission of SARS is not held as generally significant, but a host of other pathogens have not “taken a holiday” while the pandemic is proceeding, so simple precautions to reduce problematic insect contact remain wise.

Author: Allan Heckenberg Ph.D.