Under United States law, Biological select agents or toxins (BSATs)—or simply select agents for short—are bio-agents which (since 1997[1]) have been declared by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to have the "potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety".
It is composed of government, education and industry experts who provide policy recommendations on ways to minimize the possibility that knowledge and technologies emanating from biological research will be misused to threaten public health or national security.
It is composed of government, education and industry experts who provide policy recommendations on ways to minimize the possibility that knowledge and technologies emanating from biological research will be misused to threaten public health or national security.
He explained that when the CDC's Division of Select Agents and Toxins detects possible SAP misconduct by an HHS worker, it coordinates with the OIG to gather facts.
Since passage of the Bioterrorism Act of 2002, the OIG had received 68 referrals from the CDC for possible Select Agent enforcement and found violations in 30 of those cases.