The COVID-19 pandemics and the relevance of biosafety facilities for metagenomics surveillance, structured disease prevention and control

Souza, Thiago Moreno L.; Morel, Carlos Medicis

The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic represents an enormous challenge to all countries, regardless of their development status. The manipulation of its etiologic agent SARS-CoV-2 requires a biosafety containment level 3 laboratories (BSL-3) to understand virus biology and in vivo pathogenesis as well as the translation of new knowledge into the preclinical development of vaccines and antivirals. As such, BSL-3 facilities should be considered an integral part of any public health response to emerging infectious disease prevention, control and management. Differently from BSL2, BSL-3 units vary considerably along the range from industrialized to the least developed countries. Innovative Developing Countries (IDCs) such as Brazil, which excelled at controlling the 2015–2017 Zika epidemic, had to face a serious flaw in its disease control and prevention structure: the scarcity and uneven geographic distribution of its BSL-3 facilities, including those for preclinical animal experimentation.