64 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Dr. Chilton? You have nothing on this particular 
area? 
Dr. King has requested a return, and we will allow you that Dr. King, 
again under the same time rules. 
DR. KING: Okay. Of course, with respect to physical containment, al- 
though the physical objects are important it is the behavior of the people 
inside, and the fact that the people go in and out. With respect to Guide- 
lines, as a member of my safety committee, I find them unnecessarily vague 
on the specification of training. It should be made clear that all people 
who are involved in the techniques — for example, technicians, kitchen person- 
nel, who may not spend a lot of time in the laboratory, but play a crucial 
role in handling contaminated glassware, students who are a real problem, 
because they come in naive and they are going to be trained in the process — 
they don't come in pretrained. 
I would like to suggest that the Guidelines request the American 
Society for Microbiology and the American Public Health Association to col- 
laborate to develop a curriculum for appropriate biohazard training. This 
could be in the form of a short course, one, two, three weeks in duration. 
Working in a biohazardous area should require certification that you have 
passed such a course. This is routine in many areas of clinical microbio- 
logy, public health, and medicine, where you are required to have certifi- 
cation of training. 
Now, in order to really maintain safe practice, the people working in 
there have to have some control of the workplace. Dr. Barkley is solid, 
but he is very far away from Cambridge, and New Orleans, and Washington. 
Therefore, the maintenance of physical safety requires representation of 
the people working in the lab on the biohazard committee. Otherwise there 
is no mechanism for the continuous flow of information and feedback on how 
the facility is actually operating to the relevant area. The authority is 
too far away. 
So the Guidelines should mandate that all biohazards committees have 
representation of the workforce who very often are not faculty or students. 
They are, for example, technicians. If there is a union present, then cer- 
tainly the union safety committee should have their representative on the 
thing . 
Now, my last point, I was disturbed by the lack of discussion in these 
Guidelines, the lack of — again, as a criteria introduction — of how people 
who work in laboratories get infections. One might be led to believe that 
it is via ingestion, that it is gastrointestinitis , but of course it is 
not. It is cuts, it is syringe, it is puncture wounds. That, I believe, 
was one of the primary problems called attention to in the Wedum report, 
with the P4 facility. This leads to bacteremia, not gastroenteritis, to 
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