What if a carrier bringing in a package of biohazardous materials has an accident?
A release associated with a vehicular or mail-transport accident is extremely unlikely. First, the packaging of biohazardous materials is exceptionally secure (see next question.). Second, because the Ricketts Laboratory will be neither a production facility nor a facility for weapons research, the amounts of organisms that will be handled there will be small–equivalent to the milligram-or-smaller samples presently shipped to laboratories by hospitals and clinics all over the world. However, appropriate decontamination procedures for accidents involving biohazardous materials are well-documented and employees of the laboratory would be trained for any accident.
