Amy Maxmen | (TNS) KFF Health News
It’s been nearly three months since the U.S. government announced an outbreak of the bird flu virus on dairy farms. The World Health Organization considers the virus a public health concern because of its potential to cause a pandemic, yet the U.S. has tested only about 45 people across the country.
“We’re flying blind,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. With so few tests run, she said, it’s impossible to know how many farmworkers have been infected, or how serious the disease is. A lack of testing means the country might not notice if the virus begins to spread between people — the gateway to another pandemic.
“We’d like to be doing more testing. There’s no doubt about that,” said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s bird flu test is the only one the Food and Drug Administration has authorized for use right now. Shah said the agency has distributed these tests to about 100 public health labs in states. “We’ve got roughly a million available now,” he said, “and expect 1.2 million more in the next two months.”
But Nuzzo and other researchers are concerned because the CDC and public health labs aren’t generally where doctors order tests from. That job tends to be done by major clinical laboratories run by companies and universities, which lack authorization for bird flu testing.
As the outbreak grows — with at least 114 herds infected in 12 states as of June 18 — researchers said the CDC and FDA are not moving fast enough to remove barriers that block clinical labs from testing. In one case, the diagnostics company Neelyx Labs was on hold with a query for more than a month.
“Clinical labs are part of the nation’s public health system,” said Alex Greninger, assistant director of the University of Washington Medicine Clinical Virology Laboratory. “Pull us into the game. We’re stuck on the bench.”
The CDC recognized the need for clinical labs in a June 10 memo. It calls on industry to develop tests for the H5 strain of bird flu virus, the one circulating among dairy cattle. “The limited availability and accessibility of diagnostic tests for Influenza A(H5) poses several pain points,” the CDC wrote. The points include a shortage of tests if demand spikes.
Researchers, including former CDC director Tom Frieden and Anthony Fauci, who led the nation’s response to COVID, cite testing failures as a key reason the U.S. fared so poorly with COVID. Had COVID tests been widely available in early 2020, they say, the U.S. could have detected many cases before they turned into outbreaks that prompted business shutdowns and cost lives.
In an article published this month, Nuzzo and a group of colleagues noted that the problem wasn’t testing capability but a failure to deploy that capability swiftly. The U.S. reported excess mortality eight times as high as other countries with advanced labs and other technological advantages.
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Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
