Positive pressure personnel suit

BSL-4 cabinets and "Suit Laboratories" have special engineering and design features to prevent hazardous microorganisms from being disseminated into the outside environment.

Examples include the biocontainment suites at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland and the Maximum Containment Facility (MCF) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.

"[2]In the late 1970s, ILC Dover, LP, developed a special garment, the Demilitarization Protective Ensemble (DPE), to fulfill the U.S. Army's need for an off-the-shelf, positive pressure, totally encapsulating suit for use by maintenance personnel at a chemical weapons site.

[10] The Chemturion series is a series of multi-use, totally encapsulating PPPSs, currently used by Public Health Canada, Boston University, AI Signal Research, USAMRIID, the CDC, and many industrial companies such as DuPont, Dow, and Georgia Pacific.

[11] PPPSs — along with many less elaborate types of hazmat suit — have long been a staple of the science fiction and thriller genres, where they are used to accentuate the drama of biohazard scenarios.

Common dramatic (and generally unrealistic) situations involve a suit failure leading to rapid death in films such as Outbreak (1995).

In the Mass Effect series of video games, several types of aliens use variants of PPPSs, most notably the character Tali, who has a compromised immune system.

[13][14] In Bethesda's Fallout games, the Hazmat Suit is an armor item which can be equipped on a character to prevent radiation damage.