California and Washington asked the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in May to validate a new way to test for measles – but after waiting two months, the CDC denied the request, citing “other competing priorities”, according to a letter from the West Coast Health Alliance to CDC director Erica Schwartz.
The letter, signed by health officials in California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, asks Schwartz to reconsider and validate a rapid, high-volume measles test in preparation for major outbreaks. The alliance also asked the CDC to create protocols to test for other high-priority pathogens to prepare for future outbreaks.
The CDC is “ensuring state and local health departments have the support needed to strengthen measles detection and outbreak response,” said Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The agency is “prioritizing emerging technologies” to respond to the measles outbreak, Hilliard said.
The spokesperson did not answer questions about whether the CDC had plans to validate a high-throughput measles assay.
Such a test would “dramatically strengthen” the ability of laboratories to respond quickly to outbreaks, the health officials said – which would help preparedness for known pathogens like Ebola or hantavirus as well as emerging threats.
Right now, laboratories have to rely on lower-volume tests for measles, like individual polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.
In the Covid pandemic, most public health labs bought high volume equipment, like the Hologic Panther Fusion, a PCR platform for diagnosing illness that can process up to 500 tests in eight hours. That way, labs could process large batches of Covid tests very quickly.
But there is no high-throughput test to diagnose measles – at least, not one that has been published or validated by the CDC.
Texas state laboratories developed such a test during the measles outbreak in West Texas last year, but they have not distributed or published the protocol. The CDC could implement and publish this or another protocol so other public health labs could run laboratory diagnostic tests.
The CDC has reportedly completed studies on the Texas test and another from ARUP Laboratories, “but they were not full validations or a comprehensive comparison,” the officials said in the letter.
The alliance asked Schwartz to develop an assay, or test, for measles diagnostic testing on the Panther Fusion and to publish that protocol so any lab can run the tests. Having tests ready to go is an essential part of preparing, the letter said: “If a large outbreak were to occur in our region, without high-throughput capacity, it would be more difficult to scale up diagnostic testing appropriately, impairing patient care and public health investigation.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
