Surveillance of laboratory exposures to human pathogens and toxins: Canada 2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Under Canada's Human Pathogens and Toxins Act and Human Pathogens and Toxins Regulations, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is mandated with monitoring laboratory incident notifications through the Laboratory Incident Notification Canada (LINC) surveillance system.The year 2017 marks the second complete year of data.Objective: To describe the laboratory exposure and laboratory-acquired infection incidents that occurred in Canada in 2017 by sector, human pathogens and toxins involved, number of affected persons, incident type and root causes.Methods: The incidents included in the analysis occurred between January 1 and December 31, 2017.They were reported by laboratories with active licences to PHAC through the LINC surveillance system.Microsoft Excel 2010 was used for basic descriptive statistics.Results: A total of 44 exposure and laboratory-acquired infection incidents were reported to the LINC in 2017.Compared by sector and their respective shares of licences, the number of incidents was highest in the academic and hospital sectors compared with government laboratories and private industry.Altogether 118 people were exposed for an average of 2.7 people per incident (range of 1-29).There were no reports of secondary exposure.Six exposure incidents (14%) led to "suspected" (n=5) or confirmed (n=1) cases of laboratory-acquired infection.Although overall, risk group (RG)2 human pathogens and toxins were involved in the majority of incidents (n=23; 52%), Francisella tularensis (n=4; 9%) and Coccidioides immitis (n=3; 7%) were the most frequently involved in reported exposure incidents.These two pathogens are both RG3 and security-sensitive biological agents (SSBAs).An average of 2.3 root causes were identified per incident (n=101).Problems with standard operating procedures (SOPs) and human error were the two most common causes. Conclusion:The incidence of laboratory exposure incidents was relatively low in 2017.The most common route of exposure was through inhalation and the most common root causes were problems with SOPs and human error.Since this is a new surveillance system, baseline estimates are still being established.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".