AZ State Lab Sharing Biosafety Outreach Guidance
The Association of Public Health Laboratories asked the Arizona State Public Health Laboratory to present its biosafety outreach program in a national webinar, which will take place next month.
Next month, the Arizona State Public Health Laboratory will be sharing advice via a webinar for how to manage a biosafety outreach program similar to its own. The Association of Public Health Laboratories, a national organization of these public health facilities, asked officials from the facility to present their biosafety outreach program in the webinar, Dr. Cara M. Christ, M.D., director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, reported Feb. 5.
She noted that Arizona's biosafety program "includes a variety of activities designed to develop best practices in laboratory safety, and to assist partners in implementing those practices in their own facilities. These efforts include a quarterly newsletter, a semiannual seminar, and a variety of classes that have trained more than 200 laboratory workers in the past year."
The Arizona lab's chief of Biosafety and Biosecurity will present the state biosafety program during the March 2016 webinar, explaining how the state lab established its outreach program and its strategies for continuing improvement.
Every state, U.S. territory, and the District of Columbia have central public health laboratories; some of the governmental health laboratories specialize in a single area, such as environmental health, food safety or agriculture, according to APHL.