It's nice to be with you this morning. My name is Jim Welch, and I am your presenter here for the next few minutes, and I'm excited to be here to talk with you about this opportunity. You should have seen the people's face on the elevator when I got on with it. So I'll let you pass it around. This is my buddy that travels with me. This is a pass-around. Normally the audience gets into bouncing it around, which is well and good. So the first thing I'm going to tell you is that I am not a doctor. The closest thing I am to being a doctor is I'm an honorary primate veterinarian. So if you have an imaginary monkey, I can treat it. Beyond that. So if you're here for some sort of medical expertise when it comes to biological exposures, I'm not your guy. Okay? So I just, I want to be kind of up front with all that. I am the person who is engaged in what's called directed motivational reasoning. Do you all know what that is? I'm the why guy. So when somebody needs somebody as the speaker to tell people why they should do something that they may not ordinarily be doing, I'm the person who does that, which means my selection of facts is highly limited. I'm just giving you, reading you the fine print here, okay? So that you understand that I'm here to, for those of you, how many of you work in an environment already where you have the potential of having patients who have biological exposures? Okay. So this is my choir. This is my 12 noon choir. And so these people have an idea about what I'm talking about. But what I'm here is to try to help expand the number of occupational health medical providers who have a level of expertise in preventing and treating biological exposures. And our goal today is for me to convince you why you should do that and why you should consider it. And the people that raised their hand, you all can be my amen chorus or you can relate experiences. So here's the thing that the first thing I learned, and I'm going to tell you a story here in a little bit. But one of the first things I learned in this capacity that I've worked in is that oftentimes a person's personal physician knows far more about the type of insurance their patient has than they do what they do for a living, okay? So they're fully aware, and this is not a statement of condemnation, but there's usually a colored sticker or something on the folder that's a signal as to who their insurer is, Blue Cross or United or whoever it is, so that you have an idea about referrals and prescriptions and all this kind of stuff when you're dealing with a patient. That's great knowledge to have. So you have an idea of the patient's affordability. But for the most part, you don't know, a personal physician rarely knows what a person actually does at work. So the risks that they have that are work-related are generally an unknown unless the patient takes the time to explain to their care provider, you need to know what I do for a living. And so one of the things, and I have a wall full of these little dangly things where I've been the keynote speaker at safety days. And whenever anybody called me to be the keynote speaker in a safety day, I knew that the proverbial fecal material had hit the wind propulsion machine, and they needed a change in attitude or something, so they called me in this Appalachian accent, and I hope you all can understand what I'm saying. If you're Southern, you can. If you're not, you may have a little bit of trouble. But my job was to essentially do that. Fortunately, my personal physician, who unfortunately retired last year, he and I were the same age, same body build, same height, about the same weight, had children the same age. So it was one of these things when I'd go in, if it was going wrong with him and with me, it was normal. If it was generally going wrong with one of us, it was kind of abnormal. But one time I had an event, and I used to, I'm very semi-retired now, but I used to travel the world doing this kind of thing. And I had taken the time to explain that to my physician, who was aware of that. And one day I had this health event where my temperature, I was sitting watching a football game on television, relaxed at home, and in a matter of 15 minutes, my temperature went from normal to 104. And I was having conversations with Jesus. I mean, I was just kind of out of my mind. I went from nothing being wrong to what on earth is going wrong here. So my wife called my personal physician on a Sunday afternoon. I said, no, I'll be here. Just give me some time. She said, no, I'm calling the doctor. And the value of that was the first question he asked her was, where has he been? So he wanted to eliminate the zebra before we got into treating the horse. And with people who have the potential for a biological exposure in their place of work, that's the zebra. And for general physicians who deal with people who have bacterial or viral things all the time, they may not necessarily think about that being work-related. So I have the carrot and the stick, and hopefully this is going to be more of a carrot kind of thing than a stick kind of thing, but we all know that both of those work. Now, the other thing that's necessary is that a speaker give a phrase that is completely and totally makes no sense at all. So let's get that one out of the way. And that one is that conscious weight and comfort depend on a static future. Everybody just nod meaningfully at that, right? You feel good about that? Yeah. So really, the blend of that is trying to say people, as a general rule, strive in a framework of normalcy where they don't anticipate change. No matter what kind of workplace they're in or what kind of family situation, we have a vision of an anticipation of how things are going to work out. Things are going to remain relatively constant for a period of time. And all this sort of thing, I used to talk about this. In fact, I used to train people in pandemic preparation. And all that used to be a wonderful tabletop exercise, and everybody nodded their head up and down, and then that fecal material hit the wind propulsion machine, and we realized that we have very little control over normalcy. So what I want you to do real quickly, everybody's got a smartphone and they want to play with it anyway, right? So I want you to get your smartphone out, and I want you to Google something for me just to get you warmed up here. I want you to Google microbial biotechnology. This will be one of those things you'll want to scroll over later. Okay? This is stuff that's going on that most of the world has no idea it's even going on. But it is a rapidly growing segment of industry around the world. And it is something that involves blending and balancing the natural and the synthetic. And it is extremely complex. And it deals with a lot of gene therapy things and all sorts of really, really fancy science that you guys understand a whole lot better than I do. So what this means is, very simply, is that there is a world of new potential exposures in the marketplace. And it's happening among industries where you might not expect it. Here's the next thing. You got your little keep your phones out there? I want you to enter and address agc.com. agc.com. And as we get to agc.com, what we understand is that agc.com has its roots as a glass company. Chances are, if you have an automobile, you have an agc product in your car. If you have a home, chances are you have an agc product in your window, especially if you have windows that change colors and all that other kind of fancy stuff. All right, agc used to stand for the American Glass Company. It came out of a company called American Saint-Gobain, which was a French glass company until it was bought by a Japanese company called Asahi, and now it is agc. If you'll scroll down to agc, you'll see just a little line that says agc Biologics. I'm just using this company as an example. I can use agc as an example because the CEO is a guy named Chris Carrente, and he and I are longtime friends. And Chris, when he started with the company, this company made nothing but glass. They now have a state-of-the-art research facility in Longmont, Colorado, and they are a major player in microbial biotechnology. In fact, if you'll go to LinkedIn and you look up Christopher Carrente, you will see that almost all of his posts have to do with microbial biotechnology and have pretty much absolutely nothing to do with glass. In fact, they're divesting their glass manufacturers because of the growth they're having in microbial biotechnology. And if you think agc is the only company that's doing that, you're wrong. So now we have, do we have an alarm clock going off now? We still have a few seats. I'm glad to see this crowd in here. This is really exciting. All right, so that's got our conscious weight and comfort dependent. Remember that sometime and you can just throw it at somebody. Now here's the other thing. I am the master. I'm really good at this. I don't mind. I'm almost, in a few weeks, I'll be 70 years old. I can brag about myself now. I am a master at the activation phase. How many of you are familiar with the film Jeremiah Johnson? Yes, good. So I can talk to these people and the rest of you need to find it and watch it. There is a classic scene in Jeremiah Johnson. Those of you who have seen this know this. This is where the character played by Robert Redford, Jeremiah Johnson, assures a guy that he needs a grizzly, right? And so this old man gets him a grizzly and he brings in, you can get the YouTube video of this. It's a neat thing to watch. And he brings, he runs ahead of the grizzly into the cabin, closes the door with the Robert Redford character inside and says, now you deal with the grizzly. So my task here with you is I'm going to bring the grizzly in just like I brought it in with AGC, all right? Now I'm going to bring in my shark. Where is the shark? Has my shark made the tour? It is circulating, okay. So Jaws is a classic biological risk management movie. The story, the story of Jaws just in and of itself, right? And the core, you'll recall, the core of the whole issue, speaking of pandemic preparation, is how do you manage economic survival and risk? You can just, you can play with it some more, it's okay. Now I am in an audience of occupational medicine physicians. And do you know what I got you to do? I got you to handle that shark. How many of you handled that shark? How many of you handled the shark? Let's go ahead, let's fess up here, people, okay? If you handled, yeah, if you handled the shark, some biological risk was involved there because you have no idea who else handled that shark, where they have been, what they have done, and did they wash their hands? No idea at all. But hey, this is fun. So let's bounce the shark around, all right? As a species, let's accept the fact that we accept risk. And let's accept the fact that we cannot eliminate risks. What we can do is we can mitigate them. And I want to tell you what an important role occupational medicine has in mitigating the risks of people handling the sharks. Now some of you are, I guess, primarily in the stereotypical thing, and I apologize for using this, the slips, trips, falls, repetitive motion being a lot of your casework. And that will probably remain to be true because those are the kind of things that tend to happen to us more often than not. But again, if we've learned anything since 2019, is there's a great white shark. And we're going to be managing this great white shark for the foreseeable future. And what we're doing right now is we're mitigating the great white shark. Some of us are still wearing masks, some of us aren't. Most of us are vaccinated, some of us aren't. But we're at a point now where we're going to go in the water. We can argue about the benefits and the safety and all that sort of stuff about the microbial biotechnology or all that, but we're there, people. We're going down that road. We're in that water. And so now we've got to learn how to work not only with the risks that we're normally accustomed to dealing with, but with some others as well. So today, today is May the 1st, if I get choked up, bear with me. Today would have been this young woman's 47th birthday. Her name is Beth Griffin. And Beth died as a result of an ocular exposure to a macaque virus when she was a non-human primate research worker at Yerkes outside of Atlanta. That's how I'm standing here today. Because my job, my original job was to improve occupational health and safety awareness with people who work with non-human primates in research. And when I started this, I barely even knew that there were people who worked with non-human primates in research. And interestingly, one of the first people I met in doing this was the guy who was Ham's veterinarian. If you don't know who Ham was, he was the first monkey in space. But anyway, Beth, nobody had had an ocular exposure to B virus. It's a herpes virus. It's a type of herpes virus, if you're not familiar with it. We have a herpes virus that's very endemic in the human population. You get fever blisters and stuff like that. But the herpes virus that rhesus macaques can carry can be fatal. It's an encephalitic thing. It attacks the nervous system. Here's a woman who was a double major in dance and biology who, within just a couple of weeks after being exposed to a macaque virus, was paralyzed from the neck down. And in six weeks, she was dead. And she was at one of the premier research institutions in the world. And they couldn't be convinced that it was B virus because nobody has ever had it through an ocular exposure. So instead of simply handing her a bottle of isoclavir, which would have managed the virus, they treated it for everything but. But it wasn't, understand this, it was not out of stupidity, it was out of ignorance. And there's a difference between stupidity and ignorance. Ignorance is when you don't know any better, okay? Ignorance is looking at it saying, nobody's ever gotten it that way, nobody ever will. Stupidity is doing that the second time. So what we want to make sure of, and I love having this audience, we want to make sure that we eliminate the ignorance part when it comes to biological exposure. Now Beth was 22 when this occurred. She was young, blonde, and beautiful. There's a clip out of the Washington Post, it was a front page news story on the New York Times. They did a special thing on ABC 2020 about her, all this during when this was going on. And that probably came, a lot of it had to do with being young, blonde, and beautiful and all that other kind of stuff, because in the media we tend to pay more attention to tragic deaths of young people who are young, blonde, and beautiful than we do of other people. But let's understand that other people have just as much human value as this young woman here. They may not get the same media attention as she did, and may not have the resources her family had in setting up a foundation to make all this happen. But we grew out of that. So I began working with the Association of Primate Veterinarians, just a quick thing here. From that, you'll remember the SARS outbreak, those of you that are old enough to do that. So one of the things that was an outcome of the SARS outbreak was that the global public health community said, you know what we need to do, is we need to build more high containment labs around the world so that we're not shipping viruses everywhere because the infrastructure is not there. So let's go build us some high containment labs. Until then, most of that type of work was either done at CDC, at NIH, at USAMRIID, at a lab in Lyon, in Wuhan, China, you all know that one really well, right? So you had these particular labs where this kind of research would take place. But there was an expansion of those laboratories, and one of my primate veterinarian friends who worked with DARPA at the time, boy, they do some weird stuff. But he came up to me, he said that we were at the APB meeting, and he said, they're building planes and they don't have pilots. They're building things that they don't know what they're dealing with, and the risks that people face when they, there's a reason these things are only done in a few places. Because the containment of those risks is highly, highly important. So you need to get more involved in the world of biosafety, and I thought, so I looked that up. The internet existed back then, too. So I got, I then connected with a group called the American Biological Safety Association and the foundation got more involved with biosafety Particularly within the United States and then in the course of this we still have this occupational health push Marianne Where are you? This is Marianne Sandrini Marianne stand up and I you know, I won't tell you to stand up again But Marianne is the executive director of Eagleson Institute and I met Marianne because we became our foundation became a sponsor Eagleson one of the things they do is the CDC biosafety symposiums that are in Atlanta every couple of years and We did one that was that focused on Occupational health and medicine in the research community and and what we found out with these people were like, oh, there's more of us I'm not the only person out there. And so from that with Marianne's help And Warner Hudson's up here Warner wave your hand Warner was early on early one of our early docs on here And if I'm missing somebody I apologize, but we created an occupational health colloquium That focused only on preventing and treating biological exposures particularly for this community Because and and we had tremendous tremendous cooperation still have it with with with ACOEM with Because this is not in their world. This is this much, right? It's like I remember going when I was working with the primate vets I said, you know I need to go to the American Veterinary Association and introduce myself to them and I walked in and there was this 25 foot tall Inflatable bag of Purina dog chow, and I thought maybe I'm in the wrong place Right because the primate vets among veterinarians primate vets are like this, right? People who work with non-human most of the people there dogs and cats My daughter-in-law is a veterinarian. So I I know okay so so it was it was a niche so we deal we deal particularly with this niche and And we have that every year got one coming up But this has been a tremendous asset for us and hopefully for your community as well in in continuing the education of occupational health providers in Preventing and treating biological exposures now, let's just let's just go into traditional kind of stuff. There are 29,000 151 at last count by IBIS world medical and diagnostic laboratories just in the United States That represents a growth of two point three percent since 2017 And a growth of two point seven percent in the last year alone Something tells me that there's a lot of funding out there right now for medical and diagnostic labs. What do you think? and something tells me those labs are going to be continued to be increasing and Just like those high containment labs. Listen to this. This is a truth. You take out the nautical accidents most people who drown drown in shallow water It has to do with riptides has to be getting out in the ocean or somewhere and the and the riptide pulls them away But it starts in shallow water So we don't need to just think about the high containment labs where we're talking about level three level four labs You also need to think about just simple medical diagnostic labs and what people are handling in medical diagnostic labs Because sometimes they don't know what they're handling until they're handling it Okay, and These are just as much a part of potential exposures Especially since we're pulling employees in a current labor pool Where everybody is having trouble pulling employees to do anything? I Talked to one of my friends the other day who is in the construction business and He said I have to tell you I don't have time to teach him safety I'm like Okay He says I'm lucky to find somebody who works and kind of reminds me Having worked in other parts of the world One of my jobs was to just convince people that safety was an important thing period Because safety has no role in their life It is not a value. It is it's kind of like it's a first world kind of thing just like a first world problem So you go and you watch construction in that part of the world and it's nothing like watching it here and the training is nothing just like it's getting to be here and The less employees get trained in the particular risks of their work The more likelihood it is That something bad is going to happen No matter what they do Now we're going to talk about how that gets a little bit different in the biological world here in a second right now There are three hundred and thirty four thousand people working in those labs So that's a pretty hefty segment of the population Let's look at where all these kind of things are. So we've got clinical and medical That's that's the bulk of things in the country But we have veterinary and those veterinary labs are not just human pet labs. Those veterinary labs are also agricultural labs In fact, they make up some pretty heavy things We have research labs that are both in the university setting and in the private setting in addition to those that are in government settings if you have a university in your community And you can just look it up do they have a major in microbiology Do they offer courses in microbiology? Do they have a microbiology lab? Okay so one of the things that I have learned is They do different stuff in biology labs now than they did when I was in college and the lava was cooling And I don't remember the first safety lesson in my biology lab. Do you? Pardon oh The eyewash station is in the corner. Oh The good question is did it work? When was the last time somebody checked that one out? there are forensic labs and those are growing in number as well and and archaeological Studies now how many of you are involved with either employee travel or student travel? There's a whole there's a whole ball of wax there for you Particularly on the research end of things because now we have college students undergraduate and graduate traveling to exotic locations to study exotic animals Guess where most viruses come from boys and girls Exotic places that have Exotic animals All right We need an awareness factor of the potential risks And when they come home and they get sick with anything Somebody has to ask where have you been? What have you been doing? Because we're saying hello to the zebra there High-reliability Organizations These are called HRS. I've I've taken a couple of pictures of Places I live in in northeastern, Tennessee We call it God's country, but I've learned around the world that everybody calls their home God's country or something in that realm. I Live in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains My Backyard is Bays Mountain. I live in a beautiful place live in a slow lane and I commute To the left of me the picture on the left is Eastman chemical company. My little hometown is the headquarters of Eastman chemical company In the early 1960s. They had an explosion there that killed 13 people I remember it quite well because I was playing in a boys club football game Clear across town and when that explosion happened every wind in the city blew out Not everyone but they were all over a Couple of years ago. They had a steam break That made a loud explosion this year. They had one that that Popped out asbestos We're Having fun It's a high reliability organization something small going wrong in a high reliability organization Can cause damage outside that organization? All right So they so you have to have a different kind of posture when it comes to safety and public presence things like that the other plant that's in my hometown is British aerospace engineering we have BAE Which the facility there is called the Holston army ammunition plant and they make RDX That's that's the that's the stuff that they use to blow up things all over the world That's in my hometown Okay, so we have these goods and products coming and going being manufactured all this other kind of stuff It's called high reliability organizations where you have Biological laboratory that deal with things that can cause something to occur outside that facility It is a high reliability organization Because the accident itself is not necessarily confined to where it is to where that accident occurs If you haven't I'm going to call it a normal average workplace accident somebody falls off a ladder That does not affect the community as a whole If you have a biological exposure of a contagious virus You have what was the SARS outbreak because that's exactly how he got rolling So These are these are diagrams of different kinds of laboratories, but what I want you to really grasp from this is that Wherever the presence of that biological hazard emblem exists, no matter what the level of laboratory it might be Know that there is an occupational health need to relate to that particular Laboratory I cannot Encourage you enough To investigate those of you who are not doing this already to investigate what it is in your area where your services could be rendered and It will probably rest upon you not me it will rest upon you to convince those entities that they need this And they're sitting there going well, you know, we really don't have to worry about that here Which is what you hear an awful lot out there in the world It's it. Oh, you know that might happen other places But it won't happen here Right y'all heard that So know that that's something that's not true and that you'll obviously need to work through There are two texts that you need to have on your desks or somewhere in your personal library One of them is the sixth edition of value safety and microbiology and biomedical laboratories And you can download that one online It's called the BMBL By the way got to learn how to speak the acronyms of it all right When I first got into biosafety, I got to tell you this story real quickly I Took ABSA courses and the only one I could get in This is from googling up biosafety. And the first one I could get in had to do with shipping and handling of biological materials So I'm in this class This is my first training class in biosafety shipping and handling and the instructor kept talking about I oughta Oughta this oughta that I'm Southern I oughta means I ought to do something I should do something I'm serious. We hear we hear with the ears we have in the brain that that's there Right, and I'm so this doesn't make any sense. I Saw finally, you know, you have to boy. It's time to admit. I'm stupid I'm ignorant here. So what is odd? I was this person next to me and they look like they look at me like what the heck are you doing in this class? And of course it had to do with international air and train international air transport something or other But the the bimble which is the guideline for biosafety and biosecurity in laboratories. This is something that's used all over the world There's a there's a WHO version of it as well And then there is a book on laboratory acquired infections, which is one of the those are simply referred to though as LAI So when you hear people talk about LAIs, that's a laboratory acquired infection Obviously again referring back to the to the recent kovat thing there was and probably is done suspicion that the kovat virus was a laboratory acquired infection at the laboratories in Wuhan and That somebody walked out of there Working with this particular virus and somebody walked out and again a symptomatic all that you have no idea This is the real danger of a biological thing. You really have no idea that you've got it It's not like, you know, if I fall down off the ladder I know I'm hurt right away if I if I'm an exposed to something either by contact by aerosol by however I'm not gonna know that for a while more than likely if particularly if it's biological I might know a little quicker if it's chemical But I'm probably not gonna know it for a while if it's biological and if it is biological The last thing that's going to come to my mind when I'm having whatever these symptoms are is that it was something that happened to me at work So one of my jobs out there in the world is telling people who actually do those jobs You've got to be aware that you having symptoms and and somebody else having those same symptoms It's two different stories Which is why you got to tell your personal physician what you do for a living because you're not necessarily you've gone home You're not necessarily going to go to this and the other thing we have to be aware of in this particularly in these situations is that and You all probably know this a whole lot better than I am the alpha case in these things The alpha case is the first one that we know about That went to a traditional medical facility to be treated for it And it was discovered that something happened through a series of laboratory things But we really have no idea who the first person was and the first person who may have died or whatever from it It really wasn't it really wasn't unknown because nobody thought of it at that point now as you think about Expanding your horizons and going into this. This is something that laboratories have to encompass because they are high-reliability Organizations and it's called duty of care and the phrase that we use there is Responsible science you have to practice responsible science. You have to you have to Get them wrapped around in that if you do this you have a responsibility So duty of care is a universal concept It works all over the world that individuals and or institutions must to the best of their ability Mitigate any risk to others that are created by that individual or that institution Are you creating risk? Are you practicing? Are you practicing microbial biotechnology? Just as an example. Are you doing something with gene therapy? Are you doing something with will just go down through the whole list if you're doing that you have a responsibility For duty of care if you're dealing with any infectious substance whatsoever that falls into duty of care that makes you a high-reliability organization Because something that happens at work To an employee can affect the entire community. It can in fact in Impact the entire region. It can impact the entire country. It can impact the entire world. Can it not a a Simple workplace accident So what you have to do is you have to plan for duty of care it requires the Identification and assessment of potential risk to others and an implemented plan that actively mitigates the risks that are identified So the first thing just think of it as malware, right? We we kind of trusted our computer is going to bump most of those things out, right? It's there because people have gone through a what can possibly go wrong They built it into your computer and hopefully it works, but does it always work? How many of y'all have been packed? Okay, doesn't always work. Does it that doesn't make us put down our computers forever. Does it? Now it's kind of like oh, we just got to do something else But what we have to do is we have to do that and here's an especially important role for you This is where you really come in because you have the medical expertise that has to do with What are the potential risks that you know? What can we do? Prophylactically to try to mitigate that and what will what will happen if it happens? What's the sequence? What are we going to do? So you're going to be I try to get people to do this when I'm talking to research institutions So when you're doing the risk assessment when you're creating the risk assessment for a particular research project or you're You're you're creating the risk assessment for your workplace and potential risks and things that may be involved Understand this that that's part of responsible science, but it's not about the odds Okay, it's not about odds is so when I say now it's not gonna happen. It's not about odds What can it happen? Can't it happen? There's the question forget what the odds are Somebody's gonna win the megaball suddenly one way or another not me ever, but somebody's gonna win it, right? Risk assessment is about potential consequence Again on the biological exposure. We're talking about not falling off the ladder What can happen as a result not only to that person? but to everybody else Laboratory acquired infections can be a very public issue and this has to do with the spectrum of biological risk And if you get into this, this is where you'll find out some of this and most of it falls in the natural and accidental part Right. Most of our biological risks that we can counter day-to-day are natural, right? It just happens it comes with living breathing walking the streets going to work, whatever, right? Accidental has to do with unintended consequences of something So this is where the accident part comes in And we got a whole new world out there where it's intentional We had no idea this is one of my learnings in my job We had no idea none whatsoever of the size and the scope of the Soviet Union's biological warfare program until the Soviet Union collapsed So you've heard these stories about like the lab in Ukraine. I love how things get up on this That was one of their biological warfare things They didn't build them close to Moscow in that amazing key wonder why? But when the Soviet Union collapsed there's these labs there's these scientists there's these stockpiles of biological weapons, oh my So the United States and number of other countries came in to And do safety kind of stuff and anyway, that's a whole new world, but it's out there All right. So occupational health and biological exposures. There are NIH guidelines for incident reporting Particularly if you are doing if an organization is working on an NIH funded or a government funded research grant They are required for incident reporting. All right So what are the requirements? So occupational health and biological exposures. There are NIH guidelines for incident reporting. All right People that get involved in this and and you'll find this in a number of hospitals by the way, where they're doing particular types of medical research right now, they have to have what's called an Institutional Biosafety Committee, and that's what's called the IBC, there's your acronym. It has to review those research protocols, and this is a place for you to come in, in helping with those research protocols. Again, developing and identifying what the potential risks are going to be. If it has to do with animals, they're called, here's another acronym, IACUC, and that has to do with Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which has to do with, again, it's like an add-on to the IBC, if there's laboratory animals involved. And if there's laboratory animals involved, you need to find out what are these laboratory animals, what are they being injected with, what are they being tested for, what are they being, it could be any kind of study. One of the studies I observed was at an institution in the Pacific Northwest with non-human primates, was determining what kind of sound, background sound, would keep people playing a video game for a long, long time. Okay, now that was non-invasive, and I have to tell you that the monkeys were having a blast with it. I thought, man, what a job. But now not all non-human primates have that as a job in the research community. In fact, non-human primates are used right before things go to human testing. Okay? Whether it's vaccines, treatments, all sorts of things. Alright, next is developing preventive prophylactic health surveillance, employee fitness, and therapeutic plans and responses. That's where you come in, right? As all part of this part that is above. And to assist in designing standard operating procedures that reduce the risk of exposures. Remember, you will be dealing with, and those of you who are doing this already, you're dealing with an audience that is so into their research, they're so excited about the research, they are so, they have such a level of anxiety over its outcome, over the renewal of the grant, over all these other things that come with it, that things that you're thinking about and things that they're thinking about are often two different things. So there's nothing wrong with thinking about getting this research project going, but somebody has to be there going... I think these people that do like the sound and all this kind of stuff at all these kind of meetings, you'd never want to take them on and ship them. Think of all the stuff that they've heard, listened, and watched. I mean, what categories wouldn't be covered, right? There are collateral biological risk areas that, so one of them has to do with logistics and shipping. So if one of your client bases is in logistics and shipping, nobody ships more hazardous material than FedEx. If agricultural research and processing, particularly having to do with the food industry, which is becoming increasingly concentrated, and in case you haven't noted, and you'll get into it if you start looking into the microbial biotechnology, a lot of that is in agriculture, and it has to do with how do we feed more people with a healthy diet, with less water, with less land, with less blah, blah, blah, fill in the blanks, right? So some of the people that are involved in this are not your typical industries that have historically been involved. Air handling equipment, all right? This is particularly true for air handling equipment if there are biological laboratories in the place. Student research travel, we mentioned earlier, and then you have an audience of zoos, aviaries, and wildlife parks as well. Here's your next steps, and we'll get into some quick question kind of thing. Learn some of the language. If you don't know it yet, learn some of the language and the text of biosafety. Just get a general fundamental knowledge. Know enough of it to be dangerous. One of the things I used to do many, many moons ago was I worked with states in adopting science textbooks. How does that sound? And I would get up, and I'm not, you know, I'm a history guy. I can tell you that, you know, the Empire State Building opened today in 1931. I learned everything I could learn about Avogadro's Theorem, so in doing that, I would do it, we're going to do a textbook slice of Avogadro's Theorem, and I never had anybody question my scientific knowledge after we talked about Avogadro's Theorem, because I knew an awful lot about Avogadro's Theorem. Didn't know anything else about anything else, but I knew Avogadro's Theorem. All right? So when you get into this, you're going to have to be able to speak some of the language right off the bat. You're going to have to have an understanding of IBCs and IACUCs and BMBL and that sort of thing. You're going to need to connect with a biosafety professor or an environmental health and safety person who is well-versed in biosafety, okay, if you're lacking knowledge in that. Familiarize yourself with the current areas of research. Look, just kind of Google up what's growing in that. See if there's, if they're in your area or you're covering industries or customers that may have that. Identify potential audiences that could utilize your services. They're not going, this is one of those things, I don't think they're necessarily going to come to you, right? You're an additional expense, let's get real, okay? Safety is an additional expense. You know, I've watched places all over that, you know, whenever you've got to cut a budget, the first place you cut is your safety training. We really don't need to do that. They can just download something online and watch it. Check. Okay? But look what's around you. Hopefully some of you have some new eyes from listening to this. And pursue a professional network of current practitioners. So again, those of you who are doing this already, raise your hand. Doing this already. If you're not doing it, look around to see who these people are and develop them as, and work with them as a network because you're a tremendous resource to one another. I can tell you from working in the world of biosafety that the professional generosity among biosafety professionals is probably unparalleled anywhere. They share their knowledge like nobody's business. They share their best practices at a heartbeat. It's not anything they have copyrighted or patented or anything like that. So their interest is very compatible with your interest in the health of the human beings that you serve. And so engage with them as well as you can. Some online resources to explore is go to ABS International, which is the world's largest professional organization of biosafety professionals. There are other global ones. There's the European. There's the Asia Pacific region. There's a number of those. The CDC, the BMBL 6 edition, again, that's something you can download on their site. The World Health Organization, their laboratory biosafety manual, which is used in, primarily used in Europe, but it's used all over the world. But it is, it's kind of a complementary thing to CDC. They're different. Their big differ is in how they label their different biological risks. The World Health Organization is less political. If you could be less political about those things, I don't know. The Canadian biosafety standards and guidelines, if you work, if you have a client in Canada, they're, they were really pioneering in this sort of thing. The Eagleson Institute, there's Mary Ann. She's a, she's a good researcher. They do a number of biosafety related type things as well as the Occupational Health Colloquium and the NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, which is OLAW. That's another. So if you're working or have a community, a potential community where laboratory animals are used in research, then that's that one. And with that, we'll open up for some questions. Okay. And I'm going to go here before I go here. Is that all right? I mean that for those of you who are listening, I'm going to my live audience as opposed to the, the computer that has this really fine print stuff on it. Yes, sir. He's got a microphone if you don't mind. Hi, good morning. The pathway of exposure for the herpes B exposure, do they believe it was like droplets or how was it? It was a splash. It was a, the monkey got a handful of the stuff that's there at the bottom of the cage and threw it at her with a, with a high degree of accuracy. It was upset about being moved from one cage to another and, and she was not wearing eye protection. So one of the things that if you work with rhesus macaques now, you, you wear eyewear and that's a result of eye protection stuff and that's a result of this exposure. Most of the B virus exposures, and they still occur, but they mostly still occur through bites and scratches. Those of you that work in that. Yeah. Yes, ma'am. I just wanted to bring up one really interesting biological situation. I have a company that's taking E. coli. Yes. And they're growing a plastic in the vacuoles of the E. coli and then they kill the E. coli and distill it, distill the plastic off of the E. coli. And so they've just recently asked me to come in and give them medical surveillance for their employees. I have to tell you that the people that are running this project, there's maybe one that has a college education. So it's, it's a really scary situation for me. Welcome to my world. That's why I came. Won't you come on in. I'm going to do, let me, let me get one of these online here. Here's one. Should an IBC physician be board certified in infectious disease? I think that would be highly desirable, but not necessarily coming in as a physician. You come in with a level of treatment, knowledge, and awareness of medicine as a whole that is way above anybody else that is in that IBC situation. I would think that if you're dealing with a, with a highly contagious agent, if it's a level four and you're dealing, that's where there, there is no known cure for an exposure is in level four. If you're dealing with level four, then that's probably a really good idea is to have that infectious disease person, even though there's no known cure for it. Dr. Hudson. I don't have a mic, but a lot of us who work in this area are boarded in occupational medicine. A lot of us who work in this area and have sat as voting members of IBCs are boarded in occupational medicine with an interest in infectious diseases. And I'll tell you, the infectious disease people bring a lot to the party, but you have a much different and better knowledge base than the average infectious disease doctor who's working with the IBC. Yes, sir. Back here. Good to see you again. Great talk. Thank you. Two parts. So the, you know, I've been to your meetings and I think that the early part of the herpes B part, we all got good at it. And I think we're good at it now. I have been lucky enough to build an occupational health research, occupational health program dedicated to just that at BU, 12 years, senior leadership supported from the top down. And it's probably one of the better in the country. Very lucky. But I think it's important now. So we know monkey scratches and bites and Bacock bites. We can deal with that and secretions. But now when you sit on IBCs, you see everyone, researchers are working on non-human primate blood and they're, they're working with tissue and sometimes are from, you know, ATCC. So, you know, they've been tested, but a lot of times they're just coming from other labs. So on the IBC, we validate that that PI has to make sure that they've tested that before they can use it. So that's another next phase of the Griffin group. I mean, we know about secretions and working with tissue, but this is another important thing on IBC. So that we have a major role there in order, I'm ID trained, so it helps, but it's only because we moved in, I moved into this area and, and, but ID docs don't like this stuff. You're right. And you call your, your local ID docs. They don't, they don't, they have no idea what they're, what to do. Anyone else? I understand the tabernacle choir sings at noon or something like that. So, but I, I'll be around here at least for the day. Thank you so, so much for attending and I hope it was worth your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Occupational health

Biological exposures

Prevention

Treatment

Directed motivational reasoning

Expertise

Medical providers

Biological hazards

Biosafety guidelines

High-reliability organizations