Book excerpt: The increasing risk of naturally occurring and intentionally introduced infectious disease makes the existing approaches to laboratory biosafety and biosecurity no longer adequate. Biorisk management emphasizes the need for a comprehensive, laboratory-specific method to simultaneously reduce both the safety and security risks associated with biological agents in a laboratory. This volume introduces this new field and explains how to implement it. The book sets the stage for a radically different understanding of how to reduce the risks of working with biological agents in laboratories, based on a new paradigm of assessment, mitigation, and performance (the AMP model).