Inside the Australian lab where scientists study bird flu and other emerging disease threats

When Jennifer Barr arrives at work each morning, she goes through half-a-dozen security checkpoints, removes her clothes, and passes through two steel airlocked doors.

Once inside, she changes into freshly washed medical scrubs and, if she's heading into the lab, puts on a fully encapsulated suit that connects to a separate air supply — akin to what astronauts are kitted out in.

This carefully orchestrated process, involving multiple showers and hair-washes, is because this is no ordinary lab. It is a facility with the highest possible level of biosafety, where scientists handle highly transmissible and potentially lethal pathogens, including Ebola and Hendra virus.

"The suits protect us from the dangerous viruses that we're working with. They're part of our personal protective equipment that we wear every day," said Mrs Barr, an experimental scientist.

Mrs Barr leads the Pathogen Investigation Team at the CSIRO Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (ACDP) in Geelong, about an hour south-west of Melbourne.

First opened 40 years ago, the centre is one of only a handful of high-containment facilities in Australia, and the only one equipped to handle infected livestock at the highest biosecurity level.

"There's so many processes and procedures, and engineering to get to this point and work at this level, so it's very safe, even though the viruses that we're working with are not," Mrs Barr said.

At the ACDP, scientists undertake research into a range of animal and zoonotic diseases — those that spread between animals and humans — to protect livestock, wildlife and people from infectious and emerging disease threats.

And recently, the ABC got to take a peek inside.

A box in a box in a box

From the outside, the ACDP is a large, grey, and mostly unremarkable industrial building — but its high-security fences, quarantine signs, and somewhat eerie isolation suggest otherwise.

Inside, past the reception and main offices, a microbiologically "secure" area is enclosed by a 30-centimetre thick concrete wall, which can only be entered through airlocked doors.

Within this secure zone are several tightly controlled, high-containment laboratories held at lower air pressure than the outside world to ensure air flows inward, reducing the risk of viruses and other infectious agents leaking out, ACDP director Debbie Eagles said.

"We have a box in a box in a box … which means we've got multiple layers of containment with increasing negative pressure as we move in within the facility," Dr Eagles said.

The building is composed of five floors, but four of them — the two top and two bottom — are solely dedicated to supporting the running of the third floor, where the labs are located.

"The [building] designers went to international facilities, including NASA, to better get an understanding of quarantine and containment requirements, and we still have people visiting the facility today in order to understand how we manage our biocontainment," Dr Eagles said.

Within the secure area, there is an insectary for the study of insect-borne diseases, and a large animal facility, so scientists can work with infected livestock.

"That might include chickens, prawns … But we can also hold larger animals such as cattle and horses," Dr Eagles said.

The third floor also houses a round-the-clock laundry service to keep up with the facility's strict quarantine requirements, and a kitchen, so scientists can stay inside the secure zone all day.

"Absolutely everything that leaves this place gets treated in some way, in order to make sure [the pathogens] we're working with stay inside," Dr Eagles said.

The top two engineering floors contain all the equipment necessary to filter the air coming in and out of the labs, while the bottom floors collect and process all liquid and solid waste from the third floor, including hazardous bacteria and viruses.

Every barrier of containment is also duplicated or "triplicated", Dr Eagles said, to ensure another barrier kicks in should any technology, power or equipment fail.

From avian flu to Hendra virus

Originally built as an animal health laboratory, one of the main roles of the ACDP is to respond to outbreaks of animal diseases by providing rapid diagnostic tests and genetic analysis.

"We get samples for … everything from avian influenza through to African swine fever and foot and mouth disease," Dr Eagles said.

"Thankfully, a lot of those are negative … but on some occasions, we might turn up positives, as we've had for avian influenza over the last year or so."

In 2024, outbreaks of avian flu on poultry farms across Victoria, NSW and the ACT led to millions of birds being killed and the nation's egg supply being decimated.

Using genetic testing, Dr Eagles said ACDP scientists were able to determine the different strains of bird flu circulating, and help authorities understand how these strains might behave.

"If we weren't able to diagnose them, we wouldn't be able to respond to them … or control the virus," she said.

In many cases, scientists at the facility work on "regionally important viruses" that pose a threat to Australia's livestock and aquaculture industries, such as lumpy skin disease, Japanese encephalitis, and white spot syndrome.

In addition to diagnosis and surveillance, high-containment labs also allow researchers to study how diseases develop and spread, as well as test new vaccines and therapeutics for humans.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists at the ACDP undertook pre-clinical testing of the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine.

But Dr Eagles said one of the best examples of what the centre could do was its work on Hendra virus. In 1994, scientists at the ACDP isolated and identified Hendra virus for the first time, after a cluster of horses — and a person who worked with them — died in Queensland.

"Subsequently, we contributed to the development of a vaccine and were able to test that vaccine … [which] protects horses, but also really importantly, protects their owners," Dr Eagles said.

Preparing for the next pandemic

In recent decades, research has shown a rising incidence of emerging infectious diseases in humans, 75 per cent of which are estimated to come from animals.

As a result, the ACDP, alongside other health and science agencies and research institutes, has been increasingly working on both animal and human infectious diseases, and helping prepare Australia for future pandemics.

"We're contributing to the surveillance of diseases that are circulating in wildlife and other species, which helps us prepare for what that 'Disease X' might be," Dr Eagles said.

"We make sure we have the diagnostic tests to pick [these diseases] up, and then research to understand things like — what is the immune response?"

Lynn Nazareth, a research scientist at the ACDP, is working on understanding how viral infections start and spread through the nasal cavity.

"I grow the inside of the human nose in a dish and use it as a risk assessment tool to understand the threat of bird flu," Dr Nazareth said.

While it predominantly affects animals, bird flu can on rare occasions spread to humans. And the recent, unprecedented spread of the deadly H5N1 strain, which has devastated international wild bird populations and spilled over to humans, has biosecurity experts concerned about its "pandemic potential".

"[My research] helps us understand how the virus could potentially infect a human being, especially a virus that doesn't traditionally infect humans," Dr Nazareth said.

"It gives us an understanding of how the virus can spread, and also develop strategies before an outbreak [among humans] could happen."

Showering and heading home

At the end of the day, as scientists in the ACDP's high-containment labs wrap up their work, they begin the lengthy process of safely leaving the secure area.

First, they take a four-minute chemical shower wearing their biocontainment suits, followed by a three-minute water rinse, before hanging the suits up to dry.

The medical scrubs they put on in the morning are removed and left behind for laundry service, before they pass back through the first airlocked door.

"Then we have another personal shower to decontaminate ourselves," Mrs Barr said.

"We do a lot of showering and changing clothes."

Once they shower and wash their hair, they pass through the next airlocked door, and change back into their regular clothes.

It is then time to head out of the secure area and the ACDP building.

Tomorrow, when they arrive at work, they will do it all again.