I came across the following gem of a paper. It’s quite dry, talking about how there isn’t a basic standard for safe air supply to biohazard laboratories. However, it has some good resources for my colleagues managing biology laboratories. Namely, a compendium of regulations, requirements and suggestions for building and making biology labs safe.
- The Agricultural Research Service Manual is really encyclopedic. You could likely build an entire lab, literally, using this as your guidelines. In addition to biosafety, it includes a lot of valuable material on plumbing, use of renewable energy etc.
- Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL). Hardcore. Three pages of editors, and four pages of authors. This covers pretty much everything you might be interested in, right down to the different dangers of different microorganisms.
- Department of the Army: Safety Standards for Microbiological and Biomedical laboratories. I’m a big believer in learning further afield for this job, and this is a neat example of that. I quite like the short and to the point descriptions and protocols. Worth the read as a baseline.
- The National Institute of Health Design Requirements Manual. Hardcore again. Spend a month reading an internalizing it, and you are ready for anything.
- The UK’s DEFRA guidelines are short and sweet, but definitely inadequate. Use ’em as a starting point if you are setting up in Britain.
- The WHO Laboratory Biosafety Manual is the international standard for a reason, of course. Covers all the basics, but I’d definitely supplement it with BMBL if you are planning to make any use of microorganisms.
- WHO global action plan for laboratory containment of wild polioviruses. Very specialized, but I’ve often learned things from a specialized examination of a field completely foreign to me.
Those are enough to get started with. Happy reading!