Management of risks related to activities with hazardous biological material, be it research, development, production or diagnostics, requires risk assessment at various stages of the activity. To begin with, the hazards of the various biological materials need to be estimated. When genetic modification is involved methods and tools such as viral vectors, plasmids and types of inserts need to be considered. At a second stage biosafety and biosecurity measures need to be evaluated for their ability to contain the biological material. These measures on their own, whether organizational or technical, have their weaknesses and might be vulnerable to failures which need to be taken into account in incident and accident prevention. Advance application of several techniques (such as Fishbone, HAZOP, LOPA, SWIFT, Kinney, FMEA, HACCP, SSQ, Fault-tree, Bow tie, Brenner … ) to manage and assess risk especially in the areas of genetic modification, materials that have an insufficiently defined risk or information, animal and plant related work.
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