Belarus attends UPU Congress in Riyadh

A Council for Biological Security has been established under the Council of Ministers. Its composition was approved by Government Decree No. 634 of September 28, 2023, which was officially published on the National Legal Internet Portal.

According to the document, the Council will be headed by Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko. Deputy Prime Ministers Igor Petrishenko and Chairman of the Vitebsk Regional Executive Committee Alexander Subbotin have been appointed as deputy chairmen of the Council. The Council also includes Minister of Agriculture and Food Sergey Bartosh and Minister of Health Dmitry Pinevich.

The Council also includes Director of the Institute of Biophysics and Cell Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus Andrey Goncharov, Director of the Republican Scientific and Practical Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology Vladimir Gorbunov, Deputy State Secretary of the Security Council Alexander Neverovsky, and others.

The Council for Biological Security under the Council of Ministers is defined as a permanently operating body in the field of ensuring biological security, coordinating the work carried out in Belarus to prevent, detect, and mitigate biological risks associated with the negative impact of dangerous biological factors on human health, animals, plants, products of animal and plant origin, and/or the environment.

In the updated Concept of National Security, the issue of biological security is highlighted as a separate section. As Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko noted on September 13 during a meeting in the government, the relevance of this issue is growing every year. Moreover, in the last decade, there has been an intensive spread of a number of dangerous infectious diseases among humans and animals. "These include outbreaks of severe respiratory diseases, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the panzootics of African swine fever, highly pathogenic avian influenza, and others. We see that outbreaks of diseases in humans and animals that were seemingly defeated long ago are now occurring, and the problem of the spread of microorganisms resistant to antibiotic treatment is growing," the head of the Belarusian government explained at the time.

Additionally, according to him, the activities of certain states in experimenting with microorganisms and biological laboratories of unclear purpose raise significant concerns. "Moreover, we observe the activity of a number of countries, including those neighboring us, in researching the human, animal, and plant genomes, and working with pathogenic microorganisms. And this does not always have a creative scientific interest as its goal," the Prime Minister outlined the problematic issues.

"BELTA"