Program: Inside the lab working on emerging disease threats

Norman Swan: We're now going to take a walk through a Centre in Victoria, a very elaborate Centre in Victoria which is designed to protect us against old, new and emerging infectious diseases so we're ready for action, we've got diagnostics, we've got ways of treating it, and we're just monitoring it, and it also protects our agriculture. The brave person who went into the Centre was our colleague Olivia Willis, who is occasionally a co-host on the show, and Liv took us on a tour which illustrates just the layers of complexity and security that are involved in going into this facility.

[Audio: zipper noise]

For goodness sake, Olivia, what on earth is happening to you there?

Olivia Willis: Well, I'm getting suited up. I'm getting suited up because I'm in a training lab in a biosafety level 4 facility. It's a lab inside the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness. It's located in Geelong, about an hour southwest of Melbourne, and when you drive up, it looks like a big grey industrial building from the outside, but then as you get closer you realise, you know, there's high security fences, there's quarantine signs, there's a lot of security. And they don't typically invite the media in, but I went in with ABC News Breakfast presenter Nate Byrne. We got a chance to take a peek inside and do a tour of the secure zone with the director of the Centre, Debbie Eagles.

Debbie Eagles: Depending on people's experiences I'll describe it as a hospital or a nuclear facility.

Olivia Willis: So the first thing you have to do is undergo a bit of training. Then you go into kind of a two-way change room. You have to get completely undressed. This is what the scientists who work in there do every day. Once they're undressed, they walk through one airlock door and in there is a shower. Now, they don't need to shower on the way in, but they do shower on the way out. So on the way in they go through the next air-lock door and into another change room, and in that change room there's a fresh set of clothes for them.

Debbie Eagles: In front of us is laundry. We're obviously wearing clothes that we put on as we came inside, so we can't bring our street clothes in. That means all these clothes need to be washed inside, they can't go out.

Olivia Willis: And once you've done that, you get to enter the secure zone. So this is kind of like a microbiologically secure part of the facility, which is…

Norman Swan: And which is the zone where you get to meet Keanu Reeves?

Olivia Willis: I weirdly didn't find that zone. I was looking for it, but couldn't find it unfortunately. But we did get to go inside the secure zone. So it's enclosed by a 30-centimetre-thick concrete wall, floor and roof.

Debbie Eagles: In order to make sure that we don't get any leakage through any of our walls, the concrete was actually cured off-site for over 12 months before being put in place, and that's important for maintaining the pressure gradients in the facility. So we have a box in a box in a box, which means we've got multi layers of containment, and it's still well above standard 40 years on.

Norman Swan: My god, what engineering!

Olivia Willis: It's extraordinary. And the fact is, as Debbie says there, that it was built 40 years ago but today is still a highly secure building. And she told me that actually they still have scientists and researchers who visit from around the world to come and understand the engineering of the building so they can replicate those same quarantine processes in the facilities that they work in.

Norman Swan: I mean, what are these suits that you've got to wear? 

Olivia Willis: So basically they're suits that scientists get kitted out in when they're working in what they call biosafety level 4 labs, which is the highest possible level of biosecurity you can work in. And the reason that they're wearing them is because they are working with viruses and pathogens that are highly transmissible and highly dangerous. 

Norman Swan: So this would be Ebola, for example. 

Olivia Willis: Yes, that's right, Ebola, Hendra virus, essentially things that can be severe or life threatening to humans and for which there are minimal effective vaccines or treatments. And so the biosecurity and safety around it is on the really extreme end, to protect scientists who are working and also to ensure that the viruses and the dangerous pathogens stay inside the laboratories and the buildings that they're in.

Debbie Eagles: So these suits are used by our scientists that work at BSL-4.

Olivia Willis: And one of the researchers who I spoke to when we were in the training lab is a scientist named Jennifer Barr, she's an experimental scientist and she leads the pathogen investigation team there. 

Jennifer Barr: So we work in the class 2 cabinets, and that's our main level of protection, which is that cabinet there, and so basically all of the virus work is contained to those cabinets, and we really just wear the suits if something happened by accident for the virus to get out of the cabinet. But otherwise, the room is clean and everything's contained.

Olivia Willis: And in order to actually work with different viruses and all the equipment that they need, they do training with games like Operation and Jenga, because they need to work out how to have that coordination and movement in their hands while they're wearing really thick gloves and wearing these thick suits inside the labs.

Norman Swan: So it's a two-way thing. One is you don't bring in the viruses and contaminate the area, and the other is that you don't get infected yourself. So do they tell you what viruses they're working with?

Olivia Willis: So, as we mentioned earlier, they have the capacity to work with things like Ebola, and I know they are working or they do work on Hendra virus. And in fact, that was my first introduction to the ACDP, was when I was doing a story about Hendra virus few years ago…

Norman Swan: We should just explain, this is the virus that killed a horse trainer and was first described in Australia, in Queensland.

Olivia Willis: That's right, in the 1990s, and it was the first time Hendra virus had ever been seen before and identified, and it was actually sequenced at the ACDP in Geelong. So the sample from Queensland was sent down there, and that's the first time Hendra virus was ever described. And subsequently that centre was quite involved in developing the vaccine that is now used in horses for Hendra virus.

Jennifer Barr: So we have a Diagnostic Emergency Response Laboratory, which is where all our samples come into the facility before going out to the other laboratories for testing. We have a PC3 insectary where we keep a range of mosquito colonies, and we also work with ticks and midges in order to understand infections within those species. So that's up the back there. And then what we have is an animal facility where we're able to do animal trials with a range of different species, that might include chickens, prawns we've done a lot of work with after white spot syndrome virus which caused infection in prawns in Queensland and New South Wales a number of years ago, but it can also hold larger animals such as cattle and horses on rare occasions, such as when we've done testing for Hendra virus vaccine many years ago.

Olivia Willis: And they also do a lot of work on bird flu.

Lynn Nazareth: My name is Lynn Nazareth. I work as a research scientist. So I grow the inside of the nose in a dish, and I use them as a risk assessment tool to understand the threat that avian influenza possesses.

Norman Swan: What'd she say there, Liv? She said 'grow a nose in a dish'?

Olivia Willis: Yeah, exactly, grow a nose in a dish. So, doing these cell cultures to essentially understand how viral infections like bird flu…

Norman Swan: Oh, I see, so the respiratory epithelium inside the nose.

Olivia Willis: That's right, so looking at how it starts and spreads through the nasal cavity. And they're interested in looking at this in different strains of bird flu to understand potentially how it's infecting humans and also animals.

Lynn Nazareth: So I'm looking at both the Australian isolates as well as H5N1 which is causing a global endemic, and I'm trying to understand which ones can infect humans versus chickens, and develop strategies to block the virus in our noses. 

Olivia Willis: We know there was a number of outbreaks of bird flu on poultry farms in Victoria and New South Wales, I think the ACT as well. And so what the ACDP did was they were able to really determine the different strains of bird flu that were circulating last year in Australia, and basically help authorities understand how those strains might behave. And they also do work on a lot of what they describe as regionally important viruses that pose a threat to Australia's livestock industries, so things like lumpy skin disease, Japanese encephalitis.

Jennifer Barr: We also get samples in from regional countries, so we support them with testing for certain diseases as well that are both a threat for their countries and a potential threat for Australia, so, say, for Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and some of the Pacific Islands as well as Southeast Asia. 

Norman Swan: So you've already described some of their major advances, such as with Hendra and so on, but what's the loop here back to human health, if you like?

Olivia Willis: Well, I think what's become increasingly clear in the last few years and what scientists have known for a long time is the connection between animal health and human health. You know, this was previously focused on animal health diagnostics and surveillance and so on, but we know that particularly in recent decades there's been a rising incidence in infectious diseases in humans, a large majority of which come from animals. And so the ACDP, along with a lot of other health and science agencies and research institutes have been increasingly working on both animal and human infectious diseases in order to help us prepare for the next pandemic and maybe prevent it. So I guess part of this is undertaking surveillance of diseases that are circulating in wildlife and livestock, which helps us prepare for what that disease X might be.

Norman Swan: And just a final question, how would they know…I suppose it's obvious if it was Ebola and somebody caught Ebola, but how do they know that nothing escapes from there?

Olivia Willis: Well, I'm still in good health a month later, so I don't think I brought anything out with me, which is reassuring. But look, there are…

Norman Swan: And you got your old clothes back, so that's all right.

Olivia Willis: I got my old clothes back, yes. It's really clear when you visit just how many layers of security there are and how strict the containment is.

Debbie Eagles: The maximum number of showers that someone has had in one day is 23. Am I right? 

Speaker: No, 54.

Debbie Eagles: No, in one day? 

Speaker: Over a weekend.

Debbie Eagles: Okay, over a weekend.

Olivia Willis: Okay, so there's a lot of showering that's done. 

Norman Swan: Okay, I am convinced, the good citizens of Geelong don't need to worry too much.

Olivia Willis: Exactly, exactly.

Preeya Alexander: I have to say, I don't know if I could do that many showers a day. I'm not sure.

Norman Swan: No, you can never have enough showers. 

Here on ABC Radio National, you're on the Health Report.