president’s & executive director’s message
Springtime in Europe:
Lessons From Across the Pond
APHL has always recognized the importance of partnerships
to advance the field of laboratory practice to meet public
health needs. Along these lines, one of the association’s current
strategic objectives is to “expand international engagement
and learn from established laboratory systems.”
Most of APHL’s global outreach targets
laboratory system development and
support. Historically, our outreach in
the developed world has been narrow.
We have a longstanding relationship
with the Canadian Public Health
Laboratory Network and have had limited
interactions with Japan. This spring, we
focused attention on Europe, where we
found much to learn.
The initial purpose of our April trip
to Stockholm was to review the
curriculum framework for the Global
Laboratory Leadership Program (GLLP)—a
multinational effort to define laboratory
leadership competencies—based on
APHL and the US Centers for Disease
Control and Preveition (CDC) competency
guidelines. Following the GLLP session, we
met with officials from the Microbiology
Coordination Section of the European
Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
(ECDC) and then, in Bochum, Germany,
with Drs. Holger Koch and Marike Kolossa,
key leaders of the European Union’s (EU’s)
human biomonitoring network, HBM4EU.
The purpose of these latter two meetings
was simply to listen, learn and lay the
groundwork for future collaboration.
So what did we discover?
First, there are many similarities between
US and EU lab networks. Like US states,
EU member states differ significantly in
technical capabilities and funding.
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LAB MATTERS Spring 2018
Like our public health laboratories, EU
national reference laboratories seek to
fully exploit the capabilities of whole
genome sequencing (WGS) for disease
surveillance and outbreak investigations.
As reported in Frontiers in Public Health, by
mid-2016, half of EU/European Economic
Area (EEA) countries were using WGS
analysis as a first- or second-line typing
method to track EU priority pathogens
and antibiotic resistance, using Illumina
and Ion Torrent technology primarily.
Future ECDC goals will look familiar to
any US public health laboratory official:
optimization and broader use of rapid
diagnostics, further integration of WGS
in surveillance, and electronic linkage of
laboratory and public health systems.
However, there are important differences
between US and EU laboratory systems.
Unlike CDC, ECDC does not directly
operate laboratories, relying on the
network of national laboratories instead.
The EULabCap monitoring program,
launched in 2014, mirrors APHL’s work
to assess member laboratory capabilities
and capacities, identify priorities for
improvement and gauge the impact of
support activities. But while APHL focuses
on process measures and summary
data, EULabCap measures specific target
indicators—such as C. difficile test rate
and Ebola virus diagnostic capability—and
produces detailed, visually compelling
reports for each individual reference
APHL staff and members at EUCDC
EU national public health
reference labs and US public
health laboratories also share a
strong interest in fully exploiting
the capabilities of whole genome
sequencing (WGS) for disease
surveillance and outbreak
investigations.”
laboratory. ECDC uses these reports for
technical assistance and policy work.
As impressive as this work is, we were
equally excited by discussions about EU
human biomonitoring efforts and the
German biomonitoring program
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