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4,000 bio-labs in the Ukraine!!!

Thanks for posting this,about five or six links later I found this:

https://www.nap.edu/read/13315/chapter/25

HIGH-CONTAINMENT LABORATORIES IN UKRAINE: LOCAL RESOURCES AND REGULATIONS

Olena Kysil1,2, Serhiy Komisarenko1

1Palladin Institute of Biochemistry of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and 2National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, Ukraine bs.conf@gmail.com

What high-containment biological (high BSL) laboratories exist in your country? What are the facilities’ main goals and priorities?

There are over 4,000 registered microbiological laboratories in Ukraine, but only 2 of them have a permit to work with microorganisms of the first pathogenic group, 402 laboratories have a permit to work with the microorganisms of the second pathogenic group, and all others are allowed to work only with microorganisms of the third and forth pathogenic groups. Here it is necessary to note that the classification of pathogenic organisms and therefore classification of the laboratories in Ukraine differs from the international one.

It is inverted (i.e., in Ukraine “one” is the highest risk and “four” is the lowest risk) and also has some additional differences. That is why when speaking about high-containment laboratories according to Ukraine’s official classification we need to consider the laboratories that have a permit to work with the microorganisms of the first and the second pathogenic groups.

At the same time it is not possible to say that a laboratory that has a permit to work with microorganisms of the first pathogenic group in Ukraine is equivalent to an international BSL-4 lab or that one working with microorganisms of the second pathogenic group is equivalent to a BSL-3 lab.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2012. Biosecurity Challenges of the Global Expansion of High-Containment Biological Laboratories: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13315. .........................

One can only imagine the enforcement of who works on what in the Ukraine,also no mention of underground labs which are rumored to exist.