Biosafety Sharing - Exposure to Brucella Melitensis in Hospital Clinical Laboratories

Recent alert from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene on laboratory exposure to Brucella melitensis among healthcare workers in the course of performing diagnostic activities highlighted the importance of:

• Information sharing and communication between clinicians and laboratories on clinical diagnosis of patients;

• Laboratories to ensure that appropriate protocols are followed to recognise, handle, and if necessary, to refer the potential highly infectious pathogens (or samples) to other laboratories; and

• Laboratories to treat all samples as potentially infectious until proven otherwise.

Read the BioSafety Sharing news update [PDF, 302 KB].