Skip to main content
menu

Health and Safety Directorate

Biological

Scope: Queen Mary researchers and students who work in life sciences laboratories and related areas can be at risk from exposure to hazardous biological agents (also termed ‘hazardous micro-organisms’, ‘pathogens’, ‘infectious agents’). These can be viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, or novel infectious agents such as abnormal prions. Some work with hazardous biological agents will be intentional (e.g. by culturing a pathogen) and other work non-intentional, e.g. working with human, animal or environmental material (e.g. blood, cells, tissue samples, clinical samples, soil or water samples), which is likely to contain hazardous micro-organisms although the micro-organisms are not intentionally being grown (termed in these cases as ‘adventitious agents’).

 

Further information

For Advice and Assistance at QMUL, contact the H&S Manager / Advisor for your Faculty / PS or the subject lead at http://www.hsd.qmul.ac.uk/contact-us/

All H&S staff can be contacted via the help desk at hs-helpdesk@qmul.ac.uk

Return to top