Biological risk assessment

The backbone of biosafety is risk assessment.

To conduct a qualitative risk assessment, firstly all risk factors must be identified and explored. This is deduced from the tendency to increase or decrease the risk of infection. When not all information is available a conservative approach should be adopted, applying the precautionary principle: "When an activity is potentially dangerous to health and/or the environment the necessary preventive measures must be taken even if the cause-effect relationships have not been established scientifically". When working with GMOs it is also necessary to observe the "case-by-case" basis, by which an assessment must be made of the risks associated with the GMOs for each case, and the "step-by-step" principle, by which GMOs can only be released when the assessment of previous stages shows that there is no risk in passing on to the next stage (Spanish Law 9/2003).