The Pathogen Regulation Directorate (PRD), along with expert input from the Canadian Tuberculosis Laboratory Technical Network (CTLTN) and the Canadian Biosafety Officer Network (BSON) of the Canadian Public Health Laboratory Network (CPHLN), has developed a draft biosafety directive for laboratories handling pathogens within the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC). The draft MTBC Biosafety Directive provides a stratified approach to the containment of MTBC according to the specimen type and procedures used. More specifically, this Directive provides a list of activities that can be safely performed at a lower containment level (i.e., Containment Level 2) than what is normally required for research and higher risk activities with pathogens categorized at Risk Group 3. Additionally, this Directive provides a list of the operational practices from the Laboratory Biosafety Guideline (LBGs) required in order to mitigate the risk of working with MTBC at lower containment. The draft MTBC Biosafety Directive is to be utilized in conjunction with the PHAC LBGs and then, once published and in effect, the Government of Canada’s Canadian Biosafety Standards and Guidelines (CBSG).

The draft MTBC Biosafety Directive is now available for stakeholders and other interested parties to review and provide input.We have attached the Draft MTBC Directive to this email in order to provide comments directly to our office. Please submit your comments via email to standards.normes@phac-aspc.gc.ca no later than March 4, 2013.

We encourage you to distribute this request to any of your colleagues that may have a vested interest in this Biosafety Directive.

We thank you in advance for your time and feedback.

Sincerely,
Office of Biosafety Programs and Planning
PHAC Pathogen Regulation Directorate/ 
PHAC email: standards.normes@phac-aspc.gc.ca