Volume 7 • Issue 1 • 1000139 Med Saf Glob Health, an open access journal ISSN: 2574-0407 Short Communication Open Access Abad, Med Saf Glob Health 2018, 7:1 DOI: 10.4172/2574-0407.1000139 Medical Safety & Global Health M e d i c a l S a f ety & G l o b a l H e a l t h ISSN: 2574-0407 Keywords: Biocontainment; Biosafety; Emerging Diseases; Modular Lab; Lab Containers; Diagnostic Capacity Building Introduction Te keys to combat infectious diseases in developed countries are out there. And “there” are the low and medium income countries where the most of these emerging and reemerging diseases are hitting and threating public health. One of the tools in this fght is biocontainment facilities, to perform safe research on these pathogens. Te approaches to biosafety and biocontainment facilities is diverse: in our opinion, modular BSL3 facilities, already tested in manufacturing premises, instead bigger or site by site infrastructures, could be set up in such countries to process samples “on site” giving, ideally, better surveillance, short times to obtain results, and an increase in human capabilities and life-long education, and job opportunities, for scientists and technical stafs in that countries. In the last decades, sharply in the last years, emerging and reemerging diseases, most of them zoonotic, have come up on the foor. New infectious diseases have been emerging at the unprecedented rate of about one a year for the past decades, a trend that is expected to continue [1]. SARS coronavirus [2], several highly pathogenic strains of avian infuenza virus [3,4] new H1N1 infuenza, MERS coronavirus [5], Ebola, now virus Zika [6], and no one have idea which will be the following. Unknown or poorly known diseases are hitting old areas or making broader its spreading areas, sometimes on the ride of human trade, or global warming, or infestation of naïve areas by arthropod vectors. In parallel, this increased concern, mixed with some drops of bioterrorism’s threats, has fueled the design, construction and operation of a plethora of new biosafety-biocontainment facilities and/ or laboratories the most of them in developed countries [7,8], where these emerging diseases are only seen if they are carried in by tourists or migrants. As pointed out for BPP [9], at least thirty-four operational BSL-4 laboratories in twelve out of the nineteen countries surveyed were detected, and only fve of them allocated in low, medium or emerging countries. A non-proft organization specializing in security matters estimated in 2011 that roughly 40 BSL-4 labs existed or were under construction worldwide [10], although some researchers consider that an overestimate [8]. Te number of U.S. BSL-3 labs registered with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Preventions’ Select Agent Program increased from 415 in 2004 to 1495 in 2010 [7], but the actual number of BSL3 facilities is higher; at 2011 the number of UK organizations which manage BSL-3 facilities reached around 350 owning 600 sites at 2011 [11]. Tere are, of course, dozens of dozens but not several hundreds of biocontainment facilities designed, set up and actually run in low and medium income countries, and in emerging countries, in the areas where pathogens and vectors are “normal” components of the ecosystem (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, China, Brazil, and Mexico among others). Tese BSL3 facilities are giving services to more than 2/3 of human population on Earth, in areas where epidemiologic modeling suggest than a global infuenza pandemic could cause more than 90% of the global human deaths, mainly in Sub-Saharian Africa and South Asia [12]. Although the economy of some of such countries could not aford them, if a real governmental commitment is not achieved, there are lot of reasons (development of industrial and service suppliers, education of local microbiologist/virologist on site, promoting development of new surveillance nets) to encourage a developing country to commit on it, indeed through international research collaborations [13]. High Biosafety Facilities Concepts Te construction of BSL-3 or -4 facilities is highly technical, and there few universally recognized standards. Te improvement of laboratory capabilities requires investment in both time and money [14]. Any wrong (or non-right) decision could have signifcant cost repercussions. Indeed small laboratories have high costs; the total construction cost of around 30 m 2 lab and equipment investment, at 2009, accounted 400.000 US dollars [15]. Start-up consumables and reagents for one year cost additional US$ 134,655. We must also consider that building costs for a BSL-3 facility typically exceed those of a BSL-2 by 200-400%, and this diference becomes larger when operational costs come into play (from 200-800%) [16]. It has been estimated that the annual maintenance budget for high containment laboratories is ofen 10%-15% of the facility construction cost [17]. Comparatively the costs (around US$ 200.000) and lead times (12 weeks) and container maintenance (annual certifcation and every 5 year repainting) seem clearly less expensive [18]. Quite ofen, the initial budget is spent on infrastructure and equipment without considering the required costs of further operation and facility maintenance, or the training and updating cost for technical staf. In other words, obtaining money for new labs can be much easier than fnding money for long term maintenance of the old ones. So, today’s decision must be kept frmly for decades if we want actually obtain fruits of such decision; it is essential that long term goals are set and that the fnances are made available to enable and sustain continuous quality improvements [14]. *Corresponding author: Xavier Abad, Head of Biocontainment Unit/Biosafety Offcer IRTA-CReSA, Centre de Recerca en Sanitat Animal, Campus Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, Tel: +34 934674040; E-mail: xavier.abad@irta.cat Received March 24, 2018; Accepted April 04, 2018; Published April 07, 2018 Citation: Abad X (2018) Biocontainment in Low Income Countries: A Short Discussion. Med Saf Glob Health 7: 139. doi: 10.4172/2574-0407/1000139 Copyright: © 2018 Abad X. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Biocontainment in Low Income Countries: A Short Discussion Xavier Abad* Head of Biocontainment Unit/Biosafety Offcer IRTA-CReSA, Centre de Recerca en Sanitat Animal, Campus Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain