dufus Posted May 25, 2020 Share Posted May 25, 2020 Guangdong province science chief says at least one facility will be able to handle the most infectious fatal diseases such as Ebola The centres are needed ‘to cut the risks of transporting specimens and to strengthen diagnosis’ The southern Chinese province of Guangdong plans to build dozens of high-grade biosafety laboratories to handle some of the most infectious diseases in the next five years. Wang Ruijun, director general of Guangdong’s Department of Science and Technology, said there was a shortage of such facilities in the province, and the plan was to build up to 30 biosafety level-3 (BSL-3) labs and at least one BSL-4 centre within five years, news site ThePaper.cn reported on Monday. Laboratories are graded on a four-tier scale, with BSL-4 used to designate the highest-grade facilities that can house easily transmitted fatal pathogens, such as Ebola. The scale is also known as the P scale. “The US has close to 1,500 BSL-3 labs, and almost all medical organisations or medical schools have them. But, China lacks high-level biosafety labs, especially in Guangdong,” Wang was quoted as saying on the sidelines of the “two sessions”, China’s annual gathering of its political elite. There are only two BSL-4 labs in China – the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute. Guangdong has five BSL-3 labs, and no BSL-4 labs. A BSL-3 lab in Guangzhou worked with a team led by respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan to isolate the pandemic coronavirus from human specimens and conduct vaccine experiments. Wang said that as Guangdong was China’s southern gateway to the world, it was usually the first stop of infectious disease outbreaks. “From the point of developing the Greater Bay Area and solving public needs, we need to have platforms and infrastructure and be equipped with the ability to diagnose, recognise and research [infectious diseases] as well as the ability to respond to emergencies,” he said. China announced last week that each province needed at least one BSL-3 lab to strengthen the country’s public health and disease control capacity. A number of representatives at the two sessions have also expressed the need to increase the number of biosafety labs. Cai Weiping, director of the Infectious Diseases Centre at Guangzhou No 8 People’s Hospital, said most infectious disease hospitals did not have clinical labs that met biosafety standards, and so could not research lethal viruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, Middle East respiratory syndrome and Ebola. Cai said that most such hospitals should establish clinical BSL-3 labs so that they could conduct their own diagnosis during disease outbreaks and reduce the potential risks associated with transporting specimens. Shenzhen University president Li Qingquan said his institution had already applied to build a BSL-3 lab, and tight monitoring was essential. “The safety of these labs is linked to public health. If there’s no adequate supervision, safety hazards such as virus leaks can happen,” Li said. There have been accusations from senior American officials such as US President Donald Trump and US Secretary of State that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan lab. In an interview with state broadcaster CGTN on Saturday, Wang Yanyi, director of the institute, said the suggestion was “pure fabrication”. Wang said that the institute had three strains of live coronaviruses from bats and the one most similar to the pandemic pathogen shared just 79.8 per cent of its genome. source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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