Biosafety-Europe is a coordination action funded through the European Commission’s sixth framework and which started April 1st 2006. The project has 20 partners from 11 European countries and has an overall aim of promoting European harmonisation and the exchange of practices relating to biosafety and biosecurity management of biological containment facilities.

Laboratories must take into account regional and national regulatory requirements, as well as international biosafety guidelines, when developing biosecurity and biosafety management systems. The different requirements may treat some issues differently, and some issues can even be conflicting. The differences in legislative frameworks and differing ways they are interpreted is one of the major reasons that differing approaches, different controls and alternate best practices have developed within the fields of biosecurity and biosafety.

Against this background, our project aims to ask three broad questions:

• Who is working within BSL3 and 4 facilities in Europe and under which regulatory and operational frameworks?

• How are facilities implementing biosecurity and biosafety controls and are they effective?

• How can biosecurity and biosafety be improved, and how can this be harmonised at the European level?

DNV is acting as one of four work package managers and the project is coordinated by Kathin Summermatter at the Institute for Immunology and Immunoprophylaxis in Switzerland (e-mail: kathrin.summermatter@ivi.admin.ch)