Diagnostic preparedness for infectious disease outbreaks

Abstract

Diagnostics are crucial in mitigating the effect of disease outbreaks. Because diagnostic development and validation are time consuming, they should be carried out in anticipation of epidemics rather than in response to them. The diagnostic response to the 2014-15 Ebola epidemic, although ultimately effective, was slow and expensive. If a focused mechanism had existed with the technical and financial resources to drive its development ahead of the outbreak, point-of-care Ebola tests supporting a less costly and more mobile response could have been available early on in the diagnosis process. A new partnering model could drive rapid development of tests and surveillance strategies for novel pathogens that emerge in future outbreaks. We look at lessons learned from the Ebola outbreak and propose specific solutions to improve the speed of new assay development and ensure their effective deployment.

European Union training programme for tuberculosis laboratory experts: design, contribution and future direction

“…Resilient laboratory systems are critical to support TB programmes, infectious disease diagnostics and public health systems. Global Health crises such as the current Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic and the 2014-16 West Africa Ebola outbreak highlight the importance of functional laboratory systems and diagnostic capabilities [19][20][21][22]. Unfortunately, laboratory systems and infrastructure have long been neglected and under-resourced in many settings.…”

Emerging infectious disease laboratory and diagnostic preparedness to accelerate vaccine development

“…Efforts to prepare reagents, collect well-characterized samples, develop research materials, and international standards in advance for EIDs for whom alerts have already been raised, such as the WHO priority pathogens, through collaborative partnerships with governmental and philanthropic agencies along with academic and industry-based researchers will make us better suited to respond with speed to an outbreak. 24,61,69,73 Assay standardization for these or any other newly emergent infectious disease will be challenging and take time to develop, collect and characterize quality reagents, to achieve sufficient sources samples for the establishment of serological or molecular standards. 10 The commitment of researchers and companies invested in the research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of EIDs to participate and contribute to organized efforts to create and validate internationally recognized standardized reagents, assays and controls for priority pathogens in advance of an emergency is imperative and the time to start building this framework is now.…”

Point-of-care and point-of-‘can’: leveraging reference-laboratory capacity for integrated diagnosis of fever syndromes in the tropics

“…The West African Ebola outbreak in 2014/2015 highlighted the impact of weak diagnostic infrastructure, with several data supporting the notion that faster and more responsive diagnostic interventions could have slowed or arrested the spread of Ebola in affected countries [37e39]. In addition to initiatives upstream of reference laboratories [6], the GHSA was launched as a partnership of nations, international organizations and non-governmental stakeholders to promote global health security as an international priority based on three pillars: prevention of outbreaks, early detection of infectious threats, and rapid response [29,40]. It defines targets for an essential global health security diagnostics list, as well as AMR and zoonotic diseases which frequently manifest as NMFIs, and includes an action package on national laboratory systems integrating real-time biosurveillance with a functional tiered laboratory network and effective point-of-care diagnostics.…”