Marketing Biosafety
- 1.Marketing Biosafety
- 2.News from the NIH Office of Science Policy- Blog About National Biosafety Month
Discussion
During the Annual MABioN symposium, the topic of all of the negative press that biosafety has been subject to in the past 6 months was discussed and debated about. Reacting to what we perceive as negative reports in the press in a defensive manner does nothing to improve the image of Biosafety in the public’s mind. In fact, it can make us look guilty if we act defensive when challenged. As biosafety professionals we know the good that we do and how much our efforts make a difference, it is time for the biosafety community to go on the offensive and start marketing our profession in a positive manner. We must educate the public and the press about what it is we do, why we do it and how important biosafety is to research and also how important it can be in the hospital setting with all of the emerging infectious diseases that are in the news these days. ABSA, the largest professional organization for biosafety professionals in the world, is making plans to promote biosafety and MABioN plans to do its part too.
Statistics
The biggest thing that we don’t have to back up what we are saying is Statistics. We need the numbers that show science is conducted safely on our watch hundreds of times a day and thousands of times a month without incident. We don’t have the statistics like the auto industry or the airline industry to prove our safety record is strong. We as a community of biosafety professionals need to start keeping record of the number of near-misses and close calls, so we can show the proportion of those to actual incidents and injuries.
Promote!
We can also start marketing Biosafety to the public and create flyers, handouts, graphics that tell them where our focus is and what we do to keep science safe. As a group of about 45 at the MABioN symposium we each wrote down one good thing that we thought about Biosafety. The result was very inspiring and the common message was one that we should be promoting. Our President-Elect, Matt Anderson, created a word cloud graphic with the responses. In the picture above, the larger the word is the more frequent it was used in the responses. Please feel free to share this image and promote Biosafety instead of just defending it.
If you would like a full size copy of the graphic, please email us.