Is there a chance of viral contamination in any batches sent to you? If so, how is this addressed?

There is absolutely no way for what is happening in China to affect our products. The Wuhan Coronavirus is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus, which is similar to other common coronaviruses that cause 10% of the instances of the common cold in the US every year. They cannot survive very well on surfaces. I say survive, but viruses aren't alive. They don't replicate unless they are in a host. So by "survive" here I mean remain infectious. If there is moisture on the surface, and it's a hot/humid environment, they can last a little bit longer. However, that's 24-48 hours max... if even that. When you see things saying "the virus that causes the cold can survive 7 days on surfaces" what that is referring to is how long their genetic material can be detected in a lab, not how long they remain infectious. They are mainly transmitted by human-to-human contact and the transfer of body fluids. There is no way it can transfer on anything coming from China, even on express air shipping. Even if someone infected with it coughed directly on a barrel as they were loading it into the plane, it would not "survive" the trip.

For other types of bacterial pathogens, it depends on the specific one. Most cannot survive on surfaces well, and none can survive at all without water. It's warmth and moisture that allows things to survive. Our production areas are kept cold and the air dry, along with all the surfaces being sterilized between batches. Everyone is wearing full PPE with masks when working on products, and nobody that is currently sick is allowed to enter those areas. We provide plenty of sick days and time off, along with health insurance that allows for $0 out of pocket trips to the clinic if sick. So our employees are not pressured to work while sick like in many US companies, and have access to free healthcare visits if they do get sick. This means that the culture we have here is built around taking care of yourself and avoiding getting more sick because you feel you can't take time off to rest. More importantly, all our employees are aware that we would rather have one person out sick for a bit than have that person continue to work and end up with 5 people sick later. I'd love it if that was common in the US, but we all know it's not.

We do insane amounts of testing, not only of the products themselves, but the surfaces across our whole facility. We have handheld microbiological testers that we spot monitor the facility with, and regularly do full panel analyses on specific areas. Then we also do water activity testing on everything, to see if it is possible for microbial growth to even take place. A water activity result of <0.60 means it is impossible for microbes to grow on it. 99% of our products fall into that result. Anything that tests above that gets a full microbiological culture test in the lab. Nigella sativa is one that naturally falls outside that range, just by the nature of the material. So we do full micro panels on every batch, every time. Nigella sativa is naturally antimicrobial, though, and actually kills MRSA! So that's kinda cool. You could use nigella sativa to actually clean surfaces! Even so, we still do full micro panels on it just to be sure. We also have full micro panels for every batch of capsules, which are separate from the measures of the raw materials that happen before that. So we would catch anything that might get through. One thing required for NSF certification is having a microbiological contamination prevention plan in place. So we have thousands of measurement results in our database now, from every batch of raw material, every finished good, and every surface in the facility going back for years. We have not had a single contamination result in any of the thousands of measurements so far.