Bio-hazard safety cabinets to protect personnel at work

A bio-hazard safety cabinet, or biosafety cabinet as it is also known, is an enclosed medical laboratory workspace that is also ventilated in order to enable medical personnel to safely work with items that are contaminated (or are potentially contaminated) with pathogens.

What are biohazard safety cabinets used for?

The main purpose of bio-hazard safety cabinets are to protect medical personnel and their surrounding environments from potentially harmful pathogens. These cabinets use a high-efficiency particulate arresting (HEPA) filter to filter all air that exits it, trapping harmful bacteria and/or viruses in the process.

There are three different classes of biohazard safety cabinets…

Class I

Class I bio-hazard safety cabinets are designed to provide protection for personnel and environment only, this means that no item protection is provided. They are typically used to protect medical personnel who handle low risk aerosols and particulate matter, and when there is a need for containment, but not necessarily for item protection. Personnel are protected by way of keeping air constantly moving into the cabinet, away from users, and the environment is protected by filtering the air before it is expelled from the cabinet.

Class II

Class II bio-hazard safety cabinets provide item, environment and medical personnel protection. This triple protection is achieved by HEPA filtering the air inside of the cabinet, as well as the air exiting the cabinet.

By filtering air inside of the cabinet, all items being handled within the cabinet are kept clean and contaminant free. Medical personnel are in this way also protected from harmful contaminants, and as with class I cabinets, the environment is protected by filtering all air that exits it.

Class III

Class III bio-hazard safety cabinets are designed to provide an extra level of protection to medical personnel, item and environment protection that class I or II cabinets cannot provide and are used mainly for handling high risk biological agents. To ensure that this cabinet can provide maximum protection, it is always gas-tight.