The hidden face of academic researches on classified highly pathogenic microorganisms

Establishment of the benchmarking tool for evaluating the operation of biorepositories for pathogenic resource using a modified Delphi method

In recent years, as the infectious diseases caused by pathogens such as novel coronavirus and mpox (formerly called monkeypox) spread globally, the significance of identification, preservation, and sharing of pathogenic resources become prominent. Along with the rapid development of biorepositories, it is imperative to evaluate their operation in a scientific manner. By using the literature review and modified Delphi method, this study develops a benchmarking tool for the comprehensive evaluation of the operation of biorepositories for pathogenic resources. The effective response rates of both rounds of expert surveys were 100 %. The authority coefficients (Cr) were 0.82 and 0.85, respectively, manifesting the reliability of consultation results. In the second-round survey, the Kendall's coefficient of concordance (Kendall's W) of all indicators ranged from 0.09 to 0.31 (P < 0.001), the comprehensive score ranged from 4.02 to 4.94, the standard deviation ranged from 0.21 to 0.77, and the coefficient of variation (CV) ranged from 0.04 to 0.22, indicating that the expert opinions reached consensus. The final benchmarking tool was composed of 4 primary indicators, 12 secondary indicators, and 65 tertiary indicators. The weights of the four primary indicators allocated through the rank-sum ratio method, namely organizational structure, management requirements, biobanking capacity, and sharing capacity, were 30.50 %, 30.08 %, 25.45 %, and 13.97 %, respectively. The benchmarking tool established in this study provides references for the comprehensive evaluation of the operation and puts forward advice for the sustainable development of biorepositories for pathogenic resources.

The biosafety incident response competence scale for clinical nursing staff: a development and validation study

AIMS

This study was designed to develop a biosafety incident response competence scale and evaluate its validity and reliability among clinical nurses.

DESIGN

This study employed a sequential approach, comprising four phases: (1) the establishment of a multidimensional conceptual model, (2) the preliminary selection of the items, (3) further exploration and psychometric testing of the items, (4) the application of the scale among clinical nurses.

METHODS

The biosafety incident response competence conceptual model was developed through literature review and the Delphi method. A total of 1,712 clinical nurses participated in the preliminary items selection, while 1,027 clinical nurses were involved in the further psychometric testing from July 2023 to August 2023. The item analysis, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to evaluate the construct validity. Reliability was measured using Cronbach's alpha, split-half reliability, and test-retest reliability, while validity analysis included content validity, structural validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. From September to November 2023, we conducted a survey using the established scale with a total of 4338 valid questionnaires collected. T-test and variance analysis was employed to determine potential variations in biosafety incident response competence based on participants characteristics.

RESULTS

The final scale is composed of 4 factors and 29 items, including monitoring and warning abilities, nursing disposal abilities, biosafety knowledge preparedness, and infection protection abilities. The explanatory variance of the 4 factors was 75.100%. The Cronbach's alpha, split-half reliability and test-retest reliability were 0.974, 0.945 and 0.840 respectively. The Scale-level content validity index was 0.866. The Average Variance Extracted of the 4 factors was larger than 0.5, the Construct Reliability was larger than 0.7, and the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio were less than 0.9. There were significant differences in the scores of response competence among nurses of different ages, working years, titles, positions, departments, marital status and participation in biosafety training (all P < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

The biosafety incident response competence scale for nurses exhibits satisfactory reliability and validity, making it a valuable tool for assessing clinical nurses' abilities in responding to biosafety incidents.

Effects of a fully enclosed hollow-fiber centrifugal ultrafiltration technique for laboratory biosafety improvement

Laboratory biosafety has become a core focus in biological analysis, owing to the frequent occurrence of laboratory-acquired infections caused by the leakage of pathogenic microorganisms. For this purpose, the authors developed a safe pretreatment device combining a sealing technique with a direct injection technique. In this study, several bacteria and viruses were used to validate the filtration effect of the invention. Data show that the new device can completely filter bacteria and that the filtration rates for hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus reached 94% and 96%, respectively. The results show that the new preparation device can effectively block these pathogens and can improve biological safety and provide powerful protection for technicians.

Identifying Key Topics Bearing Negative Sentiment on Twitter: Insights Concerning the 2015-2016 Zika Epidemic

Background

To understand the public sentiment regarding the Zika virus, social media can be leveraged to understand how positive, negative, and neutral sentiments are expressed in society. Specifically, understanding the characteristics of negative sentiment could help inform federal disease control agencies’ efforts to disseminate relevant information to the public about Zika-related issues.

Objective

The purpose of this study was to analyze the public sentiment concerning Zika using posts on Twitter and determine the qualitative characteristics of positive, negative, and neutral sentiments expressed.

Methods

Machine learning techniques and algorithms were used to analyze the sentiment of tweets concerning Zika. A supervised machine learning classifier was built to classify tweets into 3 sentiment categories: positive, neutral, and negative. Tweets in each category were then examined using a topic-modeling approach to determine the main topics for each category, with focus on the negative category.

Results

A total of 5303 tweets were manually annotated and used to train multiple classifiers. These performed moderately well (F1 score=0.48-0.68) with text-based feature extraction. All 48,734 tweets were then categorized into the sentiment categories. Overall, 10 topics for each sentiment category were identified using topic modeling, with a focus on the negative sentiment category.

Conclusions

Our study demonstrates how sentiment expressed within discussions of epidemics on Twitter can be discovered. This allows public health officials to understand public sentiment regarding an epidemic and enables them to address specific elements of negative sentiment in real time. Our negative sentiment classifier was able to identify tweets concerning Zika with 3 broad themes: neural defects,Zika abnormalities, and reports and findings. These broad themes were based on domain expertise and from topics discussed in journals such as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and Vaccine. As the majority of topics in the negative sentiment category concerned symptoms, officials should focus on spreading information about prevention and treatment research.

The Culture of Biosafety, Biosecurity, and Responsible Conduct in the Life Sciences: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Introduction

Managing biological risks requires an organizational culture that holistically ensures the biosafety, biosecurity, and biocontainment of infectious disease agents and toxins, in addition to conducting science in a responsible manner, complying with relevant laws, regulations, guidelines, and policies, as well as emphasizing norms, values, and beliefs of the entire life sciences profession.

Methods

Drawing upon the Federal Experts Security Advisory Panel's (FESAP's) 2014 recommendation to "strengthen a culture that emphasizes biosafety, laboratory biosecurity, and responsible conduct in the life sciences," we undertook a comprehensive literature review of the culture of biosafety, biosecurity, and responsible conduct in the life sciences, including metrics by which to evaluate interventions at the organizational level.

Results

We identified 4031 unique citations published from January 2001 to January 2017 by searching the MEDLINE/PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Global Health databases. In addition, a subset of 326 articles was reviewed in full.

Discussion

We found that while there were discussions in the literature about specific elements of culture (management systems, leadership and/or personnel behavior, beliefs and attitudes, or principles for guiding decisions and behaviors), there was a general lack of integration of these concepts, as well as limited information about specific indicators or metrics and the effectiveness of training or similar interventions.

Conclusion

We concluded that life scientists seeking to foster a culture of biosafety and biosecurity should learn from the substantial literature in analogous areas such as nuclear safety and security culture, high-reliability organizations, and the responsible conduct of research, among others.

Biosafety and Biosecurity in European Containment Level 3 Laboratories: Focus on French Recent Progress and Essential Requirements

Even if European Union (EU) Member States are obliged to implement EU Directives 2000/54/EC on the protection of workers from risks related to exposure to biological agents at work, national biosafety regulations and practices varied from country to country. In fact, EU legislation on biological agents and genetically modified microorganisms is often not specific enough to ensure harmonization leading to difficulties in implementation for most laboratories. In the same way, biosecurity is a relatively new concept and a few EU Member States are known to have introduced national laboratory biosecurity legislation. In France, recent regulations have reinforced biosafety/biosecurity in containment level 3 (CL-3) laboratories but they concern a specific list of pathogens with no correlation in other European Members States. The objective of this review was to summarize European biosafety/biosecurity measures concerning CL-3 facilities focusing on French specificities. Essential requirements needed to preserve efficient biosafety measures when manipulating risk group 3 biological agents are highlighted. In addition, International, European and French standards related to containment laboratory planning, operation or biosafety equipment are described to clarify optimal biosafety and biosecurity requirements.

A novel pretreatment method combining sealing technique with direct injection technique applied for improving biosafety

AIM

People today have a stronger interest in the risk of biosafety in clinical bioanalysis. A safe, simple, effective method of preparation is needed urgently.

METHODOLOGY/RESULTS

To improve biosafety of clinical analysis, we used antiviral drugs of adefovir and tenofovir as model drugs and developed a safe pretreatment method combining sealing technique with direct injection technique. The inter- and intraday precision (RSD %) of the method were <4%, and the extraction recoveries ranged from 99.4 to 100.7%. Meanwhile, the results showed that standard solution could be used to prepare calibration curve instead of spiking plasma, acquiring more accuracy result.

CONCLUSION/DISCUSSION

Compared with traditional methods, the novel method not only improved biosecurity of the pretreatment method significantly, but also achieved several advantages including higher precision, favorable sensitivity and satisfactory recovery. With these highly practical and desirable characteristics, the novel method may become a feasible platform in bioanalysis.

Distinct lineages of Ebola virus in Guinea during the 2014 West African epidemic

An epidemic of Ebola virus disease of unprecedented scale has been ongoing for more than a year in West Africa. As of 29 April 2015, there have been 26,277 reported total cases (of which 14,895 have been laboratory confirmed) resulting in 10,899 deaths. The source of the outbreak was traced to the prefecture of Guéckédou in the forested region of southeastern Guinea. The virus later spread to the capital, Conakry, and to the neighbouring countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Mali. In March 2014, when the first cases were detected in Conakry, the Institut Pasteur of Dakar, Senegal, deployed a mobile laboratory in Donka hospital to provide diagnostic services to the greater Conakry urban area and other regions of Guinea. Through this process we sampled 85 Ebola viruses (EBOV) from patients infected from July to November 2014, and report their full genome sequences here. Phylogenetic analysis reveals the sustained transmission of three distinct viral lineages co-circulating in Guinea, including the urban setting of Conakry and its surroundings. One lineage is unique to Guinea and closely related to the earliest sampled viruses of the epidemic. A second lineage contains viruses probably reintroduced from neighbouring Sierra Leone on multiple occasions, while a third lineage later spread from Guinea to Mali. Each lineage is defined by multiple mutations, including non-synonymous changes in the virion protein 35 (VP35), glycoprotein (GP) and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (L) proteins. The viral GP is characterized by a glycosylation site modification and mutations in the mucin-like domain that could modify the outer shape of the virion. These data illustrate the ongoing ability of EBOV to develop lineage-specific and potentially phenotypically important variation.