Health Care of Laboratory Personnel

Abstract

Laboratory personnel, particularly those working in departments of microbiology, may be exposed to the risk of infection in the course of their daily work. That infections do occur from time to time is well documented. Sometimes it is the individual worker who becomes ill and in this case, if the infecting agent is common in the community, proof that the infection occurred in the laboratory may be difficult to obtain. Occasionally, many staff may be infected at the same time and if the organism is known to be absent from the community then the source, the laboratory, is apparent. Such an incident indeed took place in Michigan, USA, in 1938/39 when 45 clinical cases of brucellosis occurred in association with a laboratory. The infecting organism Brucella melitensis had not been isolated in that territory in recent years and all milk consumed by those infected was known to have been pasteurized. Rarely, infection of a laboratory employee leads to spread of disease in the community, as happened with smallpox in London in 1973. Such clear-cut examples of hazards in the laboratory do not, fortunately, occur very often but now that infectious diseases have decreased in importance in the western world such outbreaks can have profound repercussions. There is foremost the personal tragedy of deaths such as occurred in the London smallpox outbreak, or there may be chronic ill-health which follows infection with brucellosis.