Events

The course will provide a background overview and illustration of how containment facilities for plant research can be designed, constructed, and operated to meet various standards and guidelines. The standards will be based on those given by US agencies though international entities will also be referenced. Principles of plant diseases and the organisms that cause them will be discussed as well as an emphasis on the pathways that pathogens may disseminate to new areas and using diagnosis for early and accurate detection. Case studies will be used to give an overview of systems that protect cropping systems from plant diseases. [...]

This course will cover critical differences between the “normal” laboratory risk assessment process (as outlined in the Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL)) and the more holistic agricultural risk assessment process that is required to focus on both worker health and safety as well as release to the environment. Biocontainment is a part of all risk assessment processes and it becomes critically important to delineate it as a separate goal of risk mitigation strategies when working with agriculturally important agents, as they are not often highly hazardous to humans. Therefore, these agents are seen as “safe” when, in reality, [...]