Laboratory Exposure Incident Rate Per Licence: A New Metric

Human Pathogen and Toxin Act licence holders must report information regarding laboratory incidents and persons affected by laboratory exposures to the Laboratory Incident Notification Canada. Laboratory Incident Notification Canada is a national surveillance system housed at the Public Health Agency of Canada's Center for Biosecurity.

Since 2016, Laboratory Incident Notification Canada has produced annual reports that highlight surveillance findings on exposure incidents in licensed laboratories across Canada. The fall 2020 report explores incidents that occurred in 2019, and marks the fourth year of complete data.

        Surveillance of laboratory exposures to human pathogens and toxins, Canada 2019

A new measure was introduced in this year's report. Exposure incident rate is the number of incidents that occurred for every 100 active laboratory licences. In 2019, the exposure incident rate was 6 incidents per 100 active laboratory licences. Incident rates by sector were as follows:

•         public health: 40 incidents per 100 licences
•         academic: 11 incidents per 100 licences
•         hospital: 10 incidents per 100 licences
•         private industry and business sector:1 incident per 100 active licences

There is discussion of the varying exposure incident rates among sectors in the annual report.

This incident rate is a more appropriate metric than total number of incidents for comparisons over time and between sectors. For instance, a sector with more licences likely has more laboratories and a larger workforce, which puts it at an increased chance of reporting more incidents. Therefore, analyzing exposure incident rate is a better indicator of how laboratory safety varies between sectors or over time, because it considers this difference.

However, there are limitations to consider when interpreting these exposure incident rates because they employ number of licences as a proxy for the size of the work force. The gold standard metric for incident rate would capture the number of incidents per number of laboratory workers, as this would provide a more accurate picture than per number of licences alone.

The size of the workforce operating under a given licence can include one or more containment zones, and each laboratory has different workforce capacities. Laboratory Incident Notification Canada continues to enhance the surveillance system to capture workforce size per laboratory licence and improve the accuracy of the measure of exposure incident rate.