India, Singapore and the Philippines are among those building new laboratories certified as biosafety level 3 or above, but some researchers worry about the costs and risks.
Credit: Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty
But researchers in the countries that plan to build these laboratories say they are needed. The lack of high-security labs in some regions became particularly apparent during the pandemic, because work on the live virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, must be done at a BSL-3 or BSL-4 facility. The pandemic has raised public awareness of emerging diseases and the need for labs, creating a favourable environment for these investments, says Pragya Yadav, a virologist who heads the BSL-4 facility at the National Institute of Virology in Pune. A country India‘s size needs more high-containment facilities, she says.
The new labs will improve working conditions for researchers, too. Before the pandemic, Raju Mukherjee, a biochemist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Tirupati, and his students, used to travel for five hours by bus to the nearest BSL-3 lab, in Bengaluru, several times a year. He would spend about a month there at a time — adding up to four months a year away from his family — to study drug resistance in, which causes tuberculosis, and develop treatments.
Rohani Navarro, a veterinarian at the Philippines’ National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in Manila, says that she and her colleagues are constantly writing grant applications just to maintain their BSL-3 operations. She says the annual certification, which involves a thorough safety review, costs some $40,000. “High-containment facilities can become like a white elephant that isn’t used.
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