4th National Symposium on Biosafety

Working Safely with Research Animals:
Employee and Employer Responsibilities

Julie Hurley, PhD
Cornell Veterinary College
Ithaca, NY 14853-6401
607-253-3510

I'm honored to have this opportunity to speak at this Biosafety Symposium. What I'd like to do is use our program at Cornell University as an example of one way of accomplishing the goal of a safer, healthier work place for both people and animals. I will highlight who is responsible for accomplishing this goal in the different facets of our program.

I would like to give credit to the folks at AAALAC and ILAR for their insight as they provide guidance for our occupational health and safety programs in animal care and use. I am grateful for the flexibility that they are building into their recommendations. Emphasizing performance standards and using less restrictive guidelines is a freedom that allows us to use professional judgment, personal experience and common sense. Flexibility gives us the opportunity to tailor our programs to our unique situations and needs and to adapt to ever-changing situations in the endless stream of new information. This flexibility reminds us that there is more than one way of doing things right. What seems like the perfect way today may not be the best way tomorrow. This illustrates the need to reassess and make adaptations to our programs. One of the challenges is to anticipate the need for change. It seems to me that a growing and evolving program is a healthy program. That doesn't mean we have to go out and fix things that aren't broke.

Cornell University has a very large animal care and use program with hundreds of people with animal contact. It is a diverse program with diverse research interests, diverse teaching needs, diverse facilities and many, many different animal species. The result is we have a complex occupational health and safety program. It takes a lot of bodies to run this program. This takes teamwork and continuous communication.

I'd like to describe to you today the organization, function and process of our University-wide Occupational Health and Safety Program in Animal Care and Use at Cornell emphasizing who is responsible for what. I will begin with definitions outlining the approach we have taken in our occupational health program.

First, who is the program for? It is for people with animal contact in teaching, research and demonstration at Cornell University. The program functions to reduce the risks of hazards to people in the work place which in term benefits animals as well. Our program was in part a response to the Health Research Extension Act, OSHA's Chemical Lab Safety Standard and Blood-Born Pathogen Standard. The basic guides we use for our program are these Acts and Standards as well as the CDC/NIH's Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories safety manual and we look forward to the new ILAR guide on the Occupational Health and Safety in the Care and Use of Research Animals.

We use a new definition of substantial animal contact. We no longer use the temporal cutoff of an eight hour minimum of animal contact per week. We define animal contact as: direct contact with animals, contact with unpreserved animal tissues or products, or contact with items contaminated by these animal products. Animal products include tissue, body fluids and discharges such as blood, urine, feces, milk, products of conception, saliva and any other discharge. Whether or not this contact is considered substantial is based on hazard identification and risk assessment.

What are hazards? We define a hazard as anything that has been shown to have an advese health effect. There are three categories of hazards: biological, chemical and physical (radiation, loud noise, heavy lifting). These categories are based on the origin of the hazard. Animal allergens, bites, kicks and scratches are currently viewed as physical hazards at our institution.

We further break down hazards into intrinsic and extrinsic hazards. Intrinsic hazards are innate to the animals or to the care of those animals. Examples of intrinsic hazards are enzootic cryptosporidiosis in calves, chemicals used in cage cleaning and heavy lifting of baled hay to feed animals. Extrinsic hazards are those that are applied as part of the experimental protocol. Examples of extrinsic hazards are an experimentally-induced trichinellosis study, chemical toxicity studies or a study that uses radiography to monitor a new orthopedic procedure.

Cornell University has an Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee. This committee, assembled by our Center of Research Animal Resources (CRAR), is a group of people that guide the processes of hazard identification, risk assessment and risk management. The Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee provides recommendations to and works in concert with the CRAR and the IACUC. This Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee is made up of our four animal resources (CRAR) veterinarians, two who are ACLAM board certified, another who is a clinical laboratory animal veterinarian and another who is board certified in Veterinary Preventive Medicine (ACVPM). We have a nonaffiliated member from another academic institution who is board certified by ACLAM. The occupational health professionals include: an occupational health nurse practitioner and a physician who is an internist interested in infectious diseases. The College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences each have a Biosafety Officer on the committee. The College of Veterinary Medicine Biosafety Officer is also a board certified by the American Board of Veterinary Toxicology. The University Biosafety Officer, an industrial hygienst, heads our Environmental Health and Safety Services and other EHSS professionals are also on our committee. In the future we plan to include a member who represents animal facility management. It is this crowd that reviews, evaluates and makes recommendations on hazard identification, risk assessment and risk management.

We don't consider people that may have a medical problem or another issue that would affect their level of risk at this stage of the risk assessment process. The immune competency of a person does get addressed once a person has been identified as exposed to a moderate or high risk hazard.

Hazards are identified by examining the source of the animals, where the animals are housed or used, the animal species and the experimental manipulation or nature of the IACUC protocol.

Who does hazard identification at Cornell University? Everyone plays a part in this. Teamwork facilitates the process of hazard identification and communication is essential. We encourage this communication. We find out about hazards by talking to people, by disease surveillance and diagnosis, in training sessions, during facility walkthroughs and work practice evaluations. All the people that are involved: physicians, veterinarians, industrial hygienists, supervisors, managers, teachers, students, investigators and research staff all play a role in hazard identification. We try to emphasize that everyone is important and we are all motivated to work in a safe and healthy workplace. We encourage people to report accidents and we encourage people to contact us if they suspect a hazard in the work place.

Dose Response and Exposure Assessment are a team effort as well. The Environmental Health and Safety Service assesses the risk of chemical and most physical hazards at our University. The experts in these areas are the industrial hygienists, radiation safety officers, chemical lab safety professionals, back injury prevention professionals and hearing conservation professionals. Veterinarians and biosafety officers offer expertise in the area of biological hazards and bites, kicks and scratches. Some of the questions we ask concerning a hazard may be: What does it take for someone to have an adverse health effect? What has been our past experience in similar situations? How much exposure is occuring: how long, how frequent? How does the agent persist in the environment and how does get from it's reservoir into the host? What role does host immunity or agent virulence and pathogenicity play? Hazard identification, dose-response assessment and exposure assessment are really the information gathering part of risk assessment.

There are two questions we ask when characterizing the risk of an adverse health effect. What is the likelihood of that adverse health effect occurring and how severe could that adverse health effect be?

We have four categories of risk characterization. Negligible, low, moderate and high. We identify hazards and assign a risk characterization protocol based on the Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee's recommendations.

Negligible risk characterization implies that no known occupational related risk has been identified. An example of a negligible risk situation is a public event. An animal care and use protocol that involves the public such as a student livestock show should have a negligible risk. Also, certain SPF animals, most nutrition studies, or projects involving a well-defined population are usually characterized as having a negligible risk.

In the case of a low risk characterization, a low likelihood and a low to moderate severity of disease or problem has been assessed. An example of this is endemic listeriosis in a sheep flock. Listeria monocytogenes is a potential human pathogen but you would have to drink unpasteurized sheep milk to get the disease. We think that this is an unlikely situation. We do inform people about the listeriosis hazard in the work place, but we consider it a low risk.

A moderate risk characterization of a hazard would mean that this adverse health effect is more serous or easier to obtain. In healthy people a moderate risk characterization is considered a low to moderate severity and an increased likelihood of an adverse health effect. Ringworm in cattle and sore mouth in sheep are examples of moderate risk intrinsic biohazards.

A high risk characterization carries any chance of a bad outcome. These are the baddies: rabies, Herpes B virus, tuberculosis.

Distinguishing between the negligible and low groups and the high and the moderate groups is important for us because the moderate and the high risk groups of people are enrolled in an Occupational Health Program which evaluates personnel on an individual basis. We notify the health center of which people are exposed to moderate and high risk hazards. The health center requests and reviews their individual health histories to see if an individual may have a situation that causes them to have an increased risk of an adverse health effect.

What do we do when we identify these hazards and risks? What's the plan? We call it risk management. Risk management is specific to the hazard and the risk. Risk management involves identifying the people at risk. We maintain a database of persons at risk and we conduct surveillance, diagnosis and treatment on personnel in the moderate and high risk categories. We let everyone know that there's an occupational health and safety program out there regardless of the risk characterization. We conduct human and animal preventive medicine programs. Facility design and engineering controls are put into operation. We provide zoonotic disease alerts to personnel and the Occupational Health Professionals. If we identify an agent in a colony or in an animal, we notify the health center and we give them a list of people that may be exposed and when the animal was diagnosed. We describe the situation to the health center so they know it could be coming.

We emphasize education. We want people to be performing safe work practices. The heart of a long term successful program is education and training. Safe work practices, the use of personal protective equipment, awareness of what the hazards are and how to avoid them are essential to a safe and healthful workplace. Animal care issues like housing, sanitation techniques, waste disposal, carcass disposal are also a part of an Occupational Health and Safety Program.

How do we identify these people? Animal handlers are identified by the supervisor and their job description. They must have a pre-placement physical exam and participate in the occupational health program as a part of their job description. Research staff are identified on IACUC protocols and they must comply with the occupational health program needs or their approval to use animals can be withdrawn. We maintain a database of people and the hazards to which they are exposed. A veterinarian reviews the protocol, finds a hazard, list that hazard, says whether its intrinsic or extrinsic and assigns a risk to the protocol.

This information is entered into our database protocol by protocol. We have a page in our protocol that identifies who is working on the project. It asks to describe the manner of animal contact that workers will have. We request their personal data like addresses, phone numbers, etc. We enter the personal data, the hazard and start and end dates for potential exposure into the database. The hazard triggers the health center to conduct a procedure that is associated with that hazard. The data is verified and shared with the health center and the health center requests procedures associated with the hazard. For example, screening tests or a health history might be requested. The health center requests preplacement and annual health histories on people exposed to moderate and high risk hazards. This is how each person's unique needs get addressed. The health center has a list of all our known hazards, and they have a plan on how to respond to those hazards in the event of an exposure. This is part of their emergency preparedness. The Health Centerin turn informs of work related illnesses and injuries that may have an inpact on other people or the animals.

Our center for research animal resources is involved with animal disease surveillance, that is, animal preventive medicine and treatment. We send zoonotic disease alerts to the Health Center and workers with potential exposure. We're involved with facility design and engineering controls, SOP writing and approvals, waste management, posting biohazard signage, and seeing that people are wearing the clothing that they should be wearing.

A major part of our role is also education. What are the safe work practices? How do we get in and out of the facility? What's the solution, dilution of our disinfectant? If someone is actually exposed to a hazard we instruct them to go to the health center.

We have a huge Environmental Health and Safety Service at Cornell University. This group addresses more traditional occupational health and safety issues like fire safety, radiation safety, chemical lab safety. They run the hearing conservation program and they fit people for respirators and deal with the pesticide applicator people. They conduct their own facility walk throughs for fire and radiation safety. We set up chemical lab safety walk throughs with them. They do all of the HazCom (hazard communication) training. We may ask Environmental Health and Safety Services to go in and review a facility. For example, they may evaluate hazards associated with a feed milling machine. They measure noise levels and particulates in the air and let us know what we need to do to protect the people. We have another outstanding program which is the back injury prevention program. These folks will make site visits and watch people doing their jobs such as heavy lifting and make recommendations to prevent injury. They also have training seminars and they rehabilitate injured people. Keeping people on the job, keeping them off worker's compensation saves money and protects people.

The main responsibility we give to workers is to participate in the occupational health and safety program. We ask workers to learn about the hazards they're exposed to in the work place. We ask them to notify their supervisors or the CRAR if they suspect a work related hazard or illness or if they find a sick animal. We instruct workers to follow safe work practices and provide them with the rationale for the safe work practices. Wearing personal protective equipment is a safe work practice.

It is our responsibility to notify workers of the hazard in the workplace. We describe what the disease or problem is in the animal, what the problem is in people and how to protect themselves against the hazard. That is, to please follow those safe work practices. For example, we ask workers to use a pitchfork to pick up a placenta. We ask them to keep the coffee cups out of the laboratory. Does this sound familiar to anybody? We tell workers to please report accidents and wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands.

The Occupational Health and Safety Program in Animal Care and Use at Cornell University functions to reduce the risks of hazards in the work place. We provide the information and the services, but the workers must do their part in participation in the Occupational Health and Safety Program, learning about hazards and conducting safe work practices.

Office of Health and Safety, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road N.E., Mail Stop F05 Atlanta, Georgia 30333, USA Last Modified: 1/2/97
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Working Safely with Research Animals: Employee and Employer Responsibilities

Working Safely with Research Animals:
Employee and Employer Responsibilities