Meeting Critical Laboratory Needs for Animal Agriculture: Examination of Three Options.

摘要

In April 2012, the National Research Council convened a committee to provide advice on the requirements and alternatives for ensuring the nation has the necessary foreign animal and zoonotic disease research and diagnostic laboratory capabilities. In less than three months after the first public meeting to gather information, held on the rather inauspicious date of Friday the 13th (of April), the committee produced this report that analyzes three options for meeting our nations biocontainment facility needs. The committee developed a conceptual framework for an ideal system that would best capture the broad intellectual capital of the United States and would take strategic advantage of investments in laboratory infrastructure during the last decade. It was against this backdrop that the committee considered the three options. The first of three options specified in the committees statement of task was to build the National Bio- and Agro- Defense Facility (NBAF) as currently designed. The committee also evaluated whether two alternative options could provide the needed capability and capacity for addressing disease threats. These two alternative options were to build an NBAF of reduced size and scope (NBAF-lite, as the committee colloquially referred to it during discussions), and to maintain our current national biocontainment laboratory on Plum Island, with large-animal biosafety level 4 containment capacity provided by foreign laboratories.