Key takeaways
- Biological hazards exist across all industries, not just healthcare, and are often underestimated because they're invisible during standard inspections.
- Businesses have legal obligations under WHS legislation to manage biological risks so far as reasonably practicable, including through safe systems, hygiene practices, training, and health monitoring.
- Effective risk assessments require understanding how exposure actually occurs in your environment, which often needs medical expertise beyond general WHS knowledge.
- Occupational and Environmental Medical Specialists are now recognised in the updated Code of Practice as necessary contributors to biological hazard risk management.
- Proactive management (catching patterns early, reviewing controls regularly) protects worker health and avoids the disruption that comes from reactive responses after exposure has occurred.
Managing the risks you can't always see
Biological hazards are substances or agents of biological origin that pose risks to human health, including viruses, bacteria, parasites, fungi, and toxins. While often associated with clinical settings, they’re just as present in everyday workplaces, where they’re far less obvious. These hazards can lead to infectious diseases, respiratory conditions, allergic reactions, skin infections, and longer-term health impacts.
What makes them difficult to manage is that they don’t behave like typical workplace risks. You can’t always see or identify them during a standard site inspection, so they’re often underestimated. In practice, they appear in places such as contaminated groundwater on mining sites, organic dust in transport environments, and flood-affected materials on construction sites.
In March 2026, Safe Work Australia released the 2026 Code of Practice: Managing the Risks of Biological Hazards at Work, offering updated guidance on identifying, assessing, and controlling biological hazards at work. Under Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation, businesses have legal obligations to manage them. And doing so properly starts with recognising they exist across all industries and treating them with the same level of attention as any other workplace hazard
Why biological hazards are a growing workplace risk
Biological hazards aren’t new, but the conditions around them have changed, and that’s what’s driving the increased risk across modern workplaces. What used to be more contained and predictable is now far more fluid, with exposure influenced by factors well beyond the worksite itself.
Biological hazards are becoming more relevant across workplaces due to a range of factors:
- Global travel and movement of people are increasing the speed at which infectious diseases spread, exposing workplaces that may not have previously encountered these risks.
- Climate change is shifting the distribution of vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks, introducing disease risks into new regions and industries.
- Extreme weather events, including flooding and storms, increase exposure to contaminated water, soil, and organic materials.
- Dense workplaces and shared environments, particularly in large workforces or remote camps, make it easier for biological hazards to spread between workers.
We've seen mining operations where workers developed leptospirosis after heavy rainfall created standing water across the site. The bacteria had always been present, but the extreme weather event created conditions that led to a spike in exposure. What looked like isolated cases of flu-like symptoms turned into a pattern that triggered occupational health investigations, site disruptions, and workers being off for weeks.
And, when a workforce gets sick from a biological exposure, it’s rarely just an isolated incident. It leads to absenteeism across teams, operational disruption, compliance investigations, and in some cases, reputational damage that takes years to repair.
Legal responsibilities for businesses across Australia
Under Work Health and Safety legislation, a Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking has a primary duty of care to protect the health and safety of workers and others at the workplace. This includes managing risks from biological hazards so far as is reasonably practicable.
Your duty requires you to:
- Provide and maintain safe systems of work
- Maintain safe workplace environments
- Ensure appropriate facilities and hygiene practices are in place
- Provide adequate information, training, and supervision for workers
- Monitor worker health where required
Where risks cannot be eliminated, they must be minimised through practical, achievable control measures that reflect the nature of the work, the available resources, and the level of risk involved.
What's considered reasonably practicable depends on the degree of harm that might result from exposure and the likelihood of it occurring. In situations where both harm and likelihood are high, you may need to take additional steps to manage the risk, such as implementing multiple control measures or seeking specialist medical advice.
The updated Code of Practice provides practical guidance on meeting these obligations, including how to conduct risk assessments, implement controls, and monitor worker health.
The importance of risk assessments for biological hazards
Risk assessments for biological hazards require a different approach to standard workplace inspections. These risks aren’t visible, and their presence can’t be confirmed through observation alone. For example, a crew working through a flood-damaged building can’t accurately judge airborne mould levels just by looking at the space, even if surfaces appear clean or dry.
One of the most common mistakes we see is businesses assuming that because they've never had a biological hazard incident, they don't have a biological hazard problem. Exposure can often be brushed off as a general illness. Sometimes it's a worker dealing with recurring respiratory issues for months, or absenteeism that's higher in one part of the workforce than another. By the time it's recognised as a pattern, the exposure has been ongoing for far longer than it needed to be.
What matters is understanding how exposure actually occurs, whether through inhalation of contaminated air, contact with infected individuals, handling contaminated materials, working with animals, or vector transmission. From there, the focus changes to the likely health impacts and the controls that will reduce risk without creating new issues.
When Occupational and Environmental Medical Specialists are required
Managing biological hazards properly often requires expertise that sits outside what most workplace safety teams can provide. Occupational and Environmental Medical Specialists bring the medical knowledge needed to assess risks that aren't always visible or easy to quantify, and to design controls that can be effectively implemented on worksites.
They're often brought in to assess workplace health risks linked to biological exposure, interpret health and environmental data in ways that make sense for your workforce, design monitoring and surveillance programs that catch problems early, advise on infection control and vaccination strategies that fit your operational realities, and develop health management approaches that are practical and sustainable rather than theoretical.
Dr Kaleesh Seevnarain, Director and Occupational Physician at 4cRisk, recognised the need for this level of involvement and recommended to Safe Work Australia that Occupational and Environmental Medical Specialists should be included in risk assessments for biological hazards.
Safe Work Australia adopted the recommendation, and occupational physicians are now specifically mentioned in the Code of Practice as necessary contributors to workplace health risk management.
How occupational health services help businesses manage risk
The updated Code of Practice recognises that managing biological hazards isn’t always straightforward, and that specialist input is often needed to properly understand the risk. In particular, it highlights the role of medical experts, such as Occupational and Environmental Medicine Physicians, in identifying hazards, understanding how exposure occurs, and assessing the potential level of harm.
A range of occupational health services can support this by bridging the gap between what the legislation expects and what that actually looks like on site, helping businesses move beyond general safety measures and apply controls that reflect how people are really working.
- Pre-employment medical assessments to determine whether workers are suited to roles involving biological exposure risks
- Workplace health monitoring to identify early signs of exposure or illness and track trends over time
- Injury and illness management to support treatment and guide safe return-to-work processes
- On-site medical services to provide immediate care in remote or higher-risk environments
- Workplace risk assessments and health programs that align with how biological risks are identified, assessed, and managed under WHS requirements
Rather than treating biological hazards as a one-off risk to control, this approach supports ongoing monitoring and adjustment, which is exactly what the Code of Practice is aiming to achieve.
Proactive risk management protects workers and businesses
Managing biological hazards well isn't about waiting until someone gets sick and then putting measures in place. It's about noticing when things are starting to change and dealing with them before it becomes a bigger problem.
When you’re catching issues early and reviewing controls regularly, it helps keep things running as expected. Workers stay healthier, operations keep moving, and you're not dealing with the fallout of workforce shortages, project delays, or compliance investigations after the damage is already done.
Building a stronger approach to biological risks
With the updated Code of Practice now in place, alongside broader shifts in how these risks are emerging across industries, it’s worth taking a moment to step back and examine how biological hazards are managed in practice. That means moving beyond documented procedures and considering how work is actually carried out, how conditions are changing over time, and where exposure may be occurring across different roles and environments.
Bringing the right expertise into that process can help turn that review into something far more practical. At 4cRisk, we work alongside businesses to assess real exposure risks, interpret health data, and support the development of controls that reflect what’s happening on site.
If you’re taking a closer look at your current approach, or have a sense there may be gaps in how risks are being managed, it’s worth having a conversation with a team that deals with these challenges every day.
