NBAF UPDATE | Serving the greater good

This past month, we have been grateful to speak with several community groups across the region about the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. From those discussions, we know that one of the most common concerns about the facility is safety.

For NBAF to serve the greater good of protecting our food supply, agricultural economy and public health, it also must have an internal focus on safety. NBAF’s success with safety will be attributed to a combination of three basic core areas: people, procedures and facility.

Focusing on people first, we’ve discovered NBAF employees have a common desire to serve that greater good and are naturally focused on safety and security. This shared interest is a lifelong passion for many of our employees. … The partnerships also will help serve the greater good through outcomes like vaccines and faster diagnostics for high-consequence animal diseases. With Dr. Wilson’s extensive experience in many biosecurity facilities, he has a great background to provide guidance and suggestions to continue to expand NBAF’s safety and security culture.

The second area contributing to our safety culture is incorporating proven processes and best practices into Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and continually updating them as new proven approaches are identified. These SOPs identify the step-by-step measures to be followed by NBAF staff in operating the facility and conducting research.

Finally, having a facility that ensures the safety of workers and the public is a third element in building NBAF’s safety culture. NBAF’s building has many safety system redundancies, which also incorporates design criteria used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for withstanding a tornado. This will allow U.S. scientists to safely study zoonotic diseases, those diseases that can transfer from animals to humans, in large livestock at the highest level of biosafety, BSL-4 — critical research that cannot be done anywhere else in the nation currently. In fact, only four other facilities in the world can conduct BSL-4 research on large livestock.