Bhopal lab set for upgrade

With Ebola threat looming on the horizon, the government has cleared the decks for upgrading a biological laboratory in Bhopal to Biosafety Level (BSL)-4  so that it can safely handle Ebola and other dangerous pathogens.

The High Security Animal Disease Laboratory that played a key role during the SARS outbreak a decade ago, would be improved. “A proposal has been approved to upgrade the facility to BSL-4,” S C Dubey, former joint director of the laboratory said at an ongoing Indo-US meeting on emerging infections and global health security here.

The approval, however, came before the current Ebola outbreak that originated in west Africa and spread far and wide. Biosafety level-4 is the highest degree of containment that a laboratory is required to be equipped with before it can handle agents that pose the maximum threat to  humans such as Ebola and Marburg virus, as well as the organisms causing the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

India currently has only one BSL-4 laboratory on the premises of Microbial Containment Complex (MCC) at the National Institute of Virology, Pune. The Rs 65-crore facility that became operational in 2013, conducts research on emerging diseases to find quick diagnostic methods.

The Pune facility also serves as a national virus repository for the highest risk posing viral agents where viruses are archived for further research. As most of the viral agents used as bio-terrorism tools are of BSL-4 category, the MCC facility will provide an opportunity to deal with bio-terrorism.

India is the only South East Asian nation to have a BSL-4 laboratory. The Bhopal laboratory, which comes under Indian Council of Agriculture Research's Indian Veterinary Research Institute, currently complies with international bio-safety norms BSL-3 plus. With the government approval, it will be upgraded to BSL-4, Dubey said.

Ten more centrally funded laboratories with BSL-3 facilities will also be set up . The sites include Delhi, Chandigarh, Pondicherry, Dibrugarh, Bhubaneswar and at least four of the six new AIIMS type tertiary care hospitals that are coming up, sources told Deccan Herald.