Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, cyberattacks, genetic engineering, and amateur-led biology experiments could all pose threats to a country, according to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) updated guidance on lab biosecurity.
The guidance aims to help national regulatory bodies and other institutions “establish or strengthen frameworks for handling high-consequence pathogens”.
It features a comprehensive set of rules, best practices, and recommendations for managing laboratory biosecurity risks and procedures at laboratory, institutional, and national levels.
The guidance needed to be updated as “rapid technological developments and advances in methods manipulating biological material in the past decade have redefined the biological threat landscapes,” according to the guidance’s authors.
The WHO identified biosafety and biosecurity awareness as one of member states’ “weakest core capacities” after a review in 2022.
This year’s World Health Assembly adopted a resolution on ‘Strengthening laboratory biological risk management’…
