The State Duma's Health Protection Committee on December 18 recommended the adoption in the second reading of the bill, which implies an integrated approach to ensuring biological safety in Russia, said deputy Alexander Petrov. This is reported by TASS.
“We have considered the amendments for the second reading, agreed that we accept, that we do not accept,” said a member of the Duma committee. He added that the deputies voted unanimously for the draft to be adopted by the State Duma in the second reading.
The bill was introduced in December 2019 by the Russian Government. The document implies a comprehensive approach to ensuring biological safety in Russia and introduces a new conceptual apparatus that is absent in the legislation or is available in scattered methodological documents.
The project prescribes the specifics of the work of the state information system in the field of ensuring biological safety, created for the purpose of managing biological risks. The right of citizens to health protection and protection of the environment from dangerous biological factors, methods of combating the spread of infectious and parasitic diseases are consolidated.
By the second reading of the document, the Duma committee clarified that in order to reduce the spread of infectious diseases caused by pathogens that are resistant to drugs and chemical and biological agents, a restriction on the dispensing of certain drugs is being introduced. These are drugs for the treatment of infectious and parasitic diseases caused by pathogenic microorganisms. These restrictions are introduced to exclude the use of these drugs in the absence of medical indications.
By the second reading, the deputies also proposed to register several new concepts in the draft - for example, "immunodeficiency state", "accident", "emergency in the field of biological safety," and so on. The concept of biological threat is being clarified. It is proposed to understand it as the presence in Russia and abroad of dangerous biological factors and objects that can lead, for example, to the occurrence of diseases with the development of epidemics.
