Chonnam National University - Laboratory Safety Management System

Biosafety
Biosafety indicates a series of actions to properly use biological knowledge and experimental technique, equipment, and facilities to protect laboratory researchers, laboratories, and surrounding environments from potential infectious organisms or biohazards.
Basic element of biosafety
The basic elements of biosafety to prevent or minimize biohazards are proper physical containment, risk assessment capability of researchers or research organizations, and risk management operation for safety management.

Proper biosafety management such as laboratory biosafety instruction, equipment, and containment by classifying microorganisms into four risk groups in terms of pathogenicity, infectivity, and risk
and setting the biosafety level of the laboratory with four levels.

Definition of the microorganism risk group

Division	Definition	Microorganism
Risk Group 1	An organism that is unlikely to cause disease in healthy adult humans.	E. coli
Risk Group 2	A microorganism that can cause disease but is unlikely to be a serious hazard to people. Effective treatment and preventive measures are easily available	Vibrio cholerae Enteropathogenic E. coli Hepatitis virus Measles virus
Risk Group 3	A microorganism that usually causes disease and is likely to be a serious or fatal hazard to people. Effective treatment and preventive measures are available	Bacillus anthracis Brucella abortus Yersinia pestis SARS virus Yellow fever virus
Risk Group 4	A pathogen that usually causes disease and is a very serious or fatal hazard to people. Effective treatment and preventive measures are not usually available	Ebola virus Marburg virus Lassa virus Hendra-like virus

See Guidelines for Laboratory Biosafety of the National Institute of Health of the Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention

In preparation for the ratification of the protocol, Korea enacted and promulgated the “TRANSBOUNDARY MOVEMENT, ETC. OF LIVING MODIFIED ORGANISMS ACT (in short, LMO Act)” in March 2001.
After the ratification of the protocol in October 2007, the LMO Law started to be enforced from January 1, 2008.

The LMO Consolidated Public Notification contains the standard and procedure of permitting and reporting the installationㆍoperation of LMO research facilities, the standard of installing and operating the research facilities
necessary for the safety management of LMO research facilities. The research facilities that develop or use LMOs are classified into four levels in terms of safety management (Enforcement Decree of the LMO Act
[asterisk 1]) and their report or permission should be done for each level.

Classification of the safety management level of LMO research facilities

Level	Target	Reporting/Permission
Level 1	Facilities that develop or conduct experiments using LMO that is known to not cause diseases among healthy adults and LMO that is known to not cause risk to the environment	Reporting
Level 2	Facilities that develop or conduct experiments using LMO that might cause disease among humans, which is easily curable, and LMO that, even if discharged into the environment, might cause minor and easily treatable risk	Reporting
Level 3	Facilities that develop or conduct experiments using LMO that might cause disease among humans, which might have severe symptoms but is curable, and LMO that, if discharged into the environment, might cause significant but treatable risk	Permission
Level 4	Facilities that develop or conduct experiments using LMO that might cause disease among humans, which has fatal symptoms and is hardly curable, and LMO that, if discharged into the environment, might cause enormous and hardly treatable risk	Permission

※ Report status (Ministry of Science and Technology Information and Communication, as of February 2014): 1st grade (1,763) and 2nd grade (1,030) report

In addition to the regulations on the installationㆍoperation of LMO research facilities, the LMO Consolidated Public Notification handles the LMO safety management for testsㆍresearches in relation to LMO development,ㆍexperiment approval and the report of LMO imports for testㆍresearches.