Sterilization

With the heightened awareness concerning biocontainment and the emerging biohazard agents in the world today, lab designers and architects are driven to design to higher standards of containment for Bio-Safety Level (BSL) laboratory facilities.

With the heightened awareness concerning biocontainment and the emerging biohazard agents in the world today, lab designers and architects are driven to design to higher standards of containment for Bio-Safety Level (BSL) laboratory facilities. Integral to containment is the sterilizer. Sterilizers ensure the sterility of products entering and leaving the biohazard laboratory without compromising containment

.The New Biocontainment Sterilizer

To better illustrate the need for advances in BSL sterilization, let's consider the current parameters of a vacuum sterilization cycle. In basic terms, the sterilizer is a pressure vessel. When a lab needs to sterilize a biohazard product, like a rodent cage with biohazard dirty bedding, the cage is loaded into a sterilization chamber and the vacuum sterilization cycle begins.

New Features to Ensure Safety

A sterilizer used in a biocontainment facility is configured differently than a standard sterilizer used for the Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, and Life Science industries today. The safety features of a biocontainment sterilizer are paramount to the safety of the end users, service technicians, the facility, and the surrounding community. While these features do increase the cost of the sterilizer they are of the utmost importance to the proper functionality and overall safety of the BSL facility. When designing this portion of a biocontainment facility there are some important questions to ask the architect, planner, and autoclave provider.

Historically, sterilizers have been configured for BSL laboratories utilizing basic gravity and/or vacuum cycle processes to sterilize dirty animal caging and typical biohazard lab waste. Sterilizers vary in size from small to very large and are recessed in walls typically of cinder block, gypsum board or poured concrete, depending upon the biosafety level. The biohazard agent being studied at a particular lab determines the level to which that lab should be designed. A scale is used ranging from BSL-1, for labs that handle the least hazardous agents, to BSL-4 for those handling the most hazardous.

Typically, sterilization within the BSL lab is carried out using a simple process; sterilize the product for hours to ensure all the bugs are dead. Despite the potential risk in handling biohazardous agents, there are virtually no standards or guidelines for sterilizers in the biocontainment environment. Sterilizer configurations have been determined by architects or equipment manufacturers' who relied on past experiences or on the requirements of the end user.

As a result many biocontainment labs that were state of the art when they were built, in fact, have inappropriate configurations. Luckily, safety records and personal experiences verify that containment breaches due to the sterilizers in existing BSL facilities are virtually non-existent. However, as we advance as a society and realize the growing danger of terrorist activities around the world we must question the current designs and look to minimize possible risks in these facilities now and in the future.