Lessons from Ebola Can Enhance Future Diagnostic Preparedness

"Failures" in diagnostic preparedness, including testing capacity, led to delays in identifying the Ebola virus as the culprit of the 2014-2015 epidemic and contributed to the outbreak’s spread, according to a viewpoint published online May 31 in The Lancet. The authors say that lessons learned from the Ebola outbreak led to the proposed development of a new partnership model that will speed new assay development and ensure their effective deployment in future outbreaks. Post-episode reports, including those by the World Health Organization and the European Commission, showed that in the Ebola epidemic it took more than three months to identify that an outbreak was spreading in rural Guinea and it took a year for diagnostic capacity to be fully established. This delay in testing capacity was attributed to the complexity and cost of the technology used (The authors note that the fixed biocontainment laboratories using manual real-time polymerase chain reaction and staffed by those molecular experience cost more than $2 million to establish and operationalize) and contributed to the spread of the disease (Gerardo Chowell, from Arizona State University, previously estimated that diagnosing 60 percent of patients with Ebola within one day instead of five days could have dropped the […]