Chairman of the Vitebsk Regional Executive Committee Alexander Subbotin became a member of the Council for Biological Security under the Council of Ministers
According to the document, the council will be headed by Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko. The Deputy Prime Minister Igor Petrishenko and the Chairman of the Vitebsk Regional Executive Committee Alexander Subbotin have been appointed as deputy chairmen of the council. The composition of the council also includes the Minister of Agriculture and Food Sergey Bartosh and the Minister of Health Dmitry Pinevich.
The council also includes the Director of the Institute of Biophysics and Cell Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus Andrey Goncharov, the Director of the Republican Scientific and Practical Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology Vladimir Gorbunov, the 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, which coordinates 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 has been allocated a separate section. As Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko noted on September 13 during a meeting in the government, the relevance of this issue is only increasing 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 panzootic of African swine fever, highly pathogenic avian influenza, and others. We see that outbreaks of diseases in humans and animals that were thought to have been long conquered 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.
Also, according to him, the activities of certain states in conducting experiments in the field of microorganisms and biological laboratories of unclear purpose cause great concern. "Moreover, we observe the activity of a number of countries, including those bordering us, in researching the genomes of humans, animals, and plants, and working with pathogenic microorganisms. And this is not always driven by a creative scientific interest," the Prime Minister outlined the problem.
"BELTA"