Veterinary institutes may risk lives if they fail to follow safety procedures

ON DEC 2, four students from Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, were diagnosed with brucellosis, a bacterial infection that causes chronic lifetime health problems. Five days later, the number of persons infected with brucellosis had risen to 96. China Daily writer Wang Yiqing comments:

Brucellosis, classified by China's Law on the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases as a Class B infectious disease, is a disease that spreads from infected animals or unpasteurized animal products to humans. It cannot be transmitted from person to person; direct contact with animals or eating contaminated animal products is the only way a person can be infected.

The institute immediately set up an inspection team, shut down its laboratories and sent 317 researchers and students for medical tests.

According to media reports, laboratory rats are the likely source of the infection. Several students at the institute confirmed in media reports that the institute's foot-and-mouth disease prevention and control team, to which the first four infected students belong, had found their lab rats to be infected with brucellosis at the end of November.

This large-scale infection incident is of major public concern and raises several questions, the most important being whether it has something to do with loopholes in the health and safety procedures at the institute.

Media reports said a vaccine for brucellosis is available, but in this case, apparently, the researchers and students had not been vaccinated in advance.

Some students with experience of having worked in biological laboratories said laboratory rats are generally purchased by students of the research teams and they seldom conduct tests, before research, to check if the rats are infected.

Some students at the institute even said that implementation of laboratory risk prevention measures was not very strict, and students sometimes conducted experiments taking only the basic precaution of wearing a white lab coat and gloves.

The National Health Committee and Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which are involved in the investigation into the incident, must conduct a thorough probe and make the results public. If the incident is really the result of lax protection awareness, the relevant authorities should learn a lesson from this incident and better implement laboratory risk prevention measures to safeguard researchers and students' health and safety.