Question: Have you ever caught a virus you were working with?

Ian Hands-Portman answered on 12 Mar 2014:

No, thankfully! We have things in place to stop this happening – first if we can, we use something less dangerous, it’s sometimes possible to use a dead ( or as we call it ‘fixed’ ) sample. If we can’t do that then we do the preparation in a special ‘Containment’ laboratory – there are different grades according to how nasty the bug is you’re handling.

I hate being in Containment level 3 which is for the real nasties – wearing 2 pairs of gloves, special lab coats, an air lock door and glove boxes. You can’t scratch your nose and it smells of bleach all the time.

Some people’s samples get sick though – people working on human cells in a test tube have to be careful they don’t catch their colds and sniffles.