• Question: Have you ever caught the same virus while finding information about it?

    Asked by puma449mad on 31 Jan 2022.
    • Photo: Holly Kerr

      Holly Kerr answered on 31 Jan 2022:

      Great question! There are lots of health and safety procedures that we follow in a lab to make sure this doesn’t happen. For viruses that can cause severe disease, like SARS-CoV-2 which causes COVID-19, these rules are even stricter and restricted to people who have had extensive training. At the moment, although I work with SARS-CoV-2 nearly every day in work I am much more likely to catch it out in the wild (from other humans!) rather than from in the lab.

    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 1 Feb 2022:

      I have not thankfully, and as Holly said above the careful safety procedures in labs that handle risky viruses or microbes means they are as safe to work in as we can make it (and probably safer than normal activities like shops and public transport during the pandemic!)

      Of course there is always a chance of accidents happening. I knew a colleague during my PhD who caught an unpleasant bacterial infection from their work, I do not think they broke any safety rules just got very unlucky! Back in the 2000s there were also a few isolated outbreaks of SARS-1 in workers studying the virus in labs. But in general our lab procedures keep us nice and safe!

    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 2 Feb 2022:

      Thats a fun question 🙂
      No I have not, but I also mainly worked with vaccinia virus which is not super infectious. Unlike SARS-CoV-2 it can not travel through air, so you can’t breathe it in. It could be bad if I got it in the eye but of course we have safety measures in place when working with viruses to prevent that.

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