Eurosurveillance has just published a timely article: Status, quality and specific needs of Ebola virus diagnostic capacity and capability in laboratories of the two European preparedness laboratory networks EMERGE and EVD-LabNet. Excerpt from the conclusion:
While the EBOV outbreak in West Africa was the largest on record, the risk for Europe was considered low. Nevertheless, the outbreak activated a broad laboratory and clinical response in Europe. One approach to manage such response to an outbreak with limited risks could be to centralise such diagnostics in a limited number of BSL4 laboratories. In line with this, we observed that a vast majority of the samples tested for EBOV in the European laboratories were tested by the BSL4 laboratories.
However, while samples from patients outside Europe were most likely to be sent to the BSL4 laboratories, local suspected cases were most likely to be tested in first-line, local diagnostic laboratories without BSL4 capacity but with the possibility for confirmatory testing in BSL4 laboratories. Furthermore, in the early phases of an outbreak, it is difficult to predict whether scaled up capacity will be needed.
Also, many specialised diagnostic laboratories of both laboratory preparedness networks provide haemorrhagic fever differential diagnostics besides the BSL4 laboratories and were called in to provide guidance for national and institutional level preparedness planning for EBOV patients.
