AMP president updates CDC committee on H1...(the molecular laboratories in the Chicag...)

Date:9/2/2009

the molecular laboratories in the Chicago area participated in a conference call with the Illinois Department of Public Health to exchange information about tests in use, testing capacity, confirmatory capabilities, etc. Within a week the community labs had sufficient information to know that available assays for influenza A were capable of detecting the novel H1N1 strain, and furthermore, that some assays were capable of specifically identifying the novel H1N1 subtype. This knowledge greatly reduced the number of specimens that needed to be confirmed by IDPH. By the end of week two of the outbreak, many labs had sufficient data from IDPH to validate their assays, and were asked to limit their submissions for IDPH confirmation. After four weeks, more cases of H1N1 had been diagnosed in community molecular diagnostic laboratories (790 cases) than by IDPH (698 cases).

Dr. Nowak shared his experience, "by the end of the first week of the H1N1 episode, our own laboratory had identified 39 cases of probable H1N1 infection, only a fraction of which had been corroborated by our state public health laboratory, and confirmed only sometime after day 8." The CDC tally for all of Illinois at the end that week was still only 3 cases confirmed, a number widely reported in the media, which greatly misinformed the public and the medical community of the true nature of the spread of this disease in Illinois.

With the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology warning that more than half of the US population will be infected with the H1N1 influenza virus this flu season, AMP encourages close collaboration between molecular diagnostics laboratories, CDC, and public health laboratories to ensure prompt diagnosis and timely surveillance of the outbreak. Dr. Nowak expressed his pride in his profession's role in the outbreak, "In the recent H1N1 outbreak, I believe the quality of laboratory testing has been outstanding, as has been the response of m
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Contact: Mary Steele Williams mwilliams@amp.org 301-634-7921 Association for Molecular Pathology Source:Eurekalert

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