FEATURE
“You need them to understand how you
determine what someone is ingesting
based on laboratory results,” Goodin
said. “That’s not always a one-to-one
correlation. There’s a lot of human biology
involved.”
This can help public health practitioners and law enforcement target
evidence-based interventions to save lives,”
Grant Baldwin, PhD, MPH
Goodin hopes the APHL task force’s Model
Biosurveillance Strategy resource provides
an easy introduction into the topic for
epidemiologists. “It can be intimidating
to learn a new area,” she said. “It’s hard
when you don’t even know the right
questions to ask.”
Public health laboratories can fill a gap
in public health surveillance for drug
misuse and overdoses. Although the
extent of the opioid crisis varies from
state to state, they have the knowledge
and instrumentation for effective
overdose surveillance. Said King, “These
programs provide factual, laboratorybased
characterization of the non-fatal
overdoses that will help devise more
effective public health approaches to
prevent irreversible, fatal overdoses.” n
A scientist demonstrates a method to perform fentanyl testing without a biosafety cabinet. Photo: CDC
Droplet Digital PCR for Public Health Testing
INFECTIOUS DISEASE n WATER TESTING n NEWBORN SCREENING*
Droplet Digital PCR (ddPCR) provides highly sensitive absolute
quantitation of DNA or RNA in a wide variety of challenging
samples. By partitioning a sample into thousands of droplets,
ddPCR offers unrivaled precision and reproducibility for
environmental monitoring and evaluating a diverse range
of human health conditions.
* ddPCR is RUO and has not been evaluated by the FDA for newborn screening or infectious disease.
info.bio-rad.com/APHLGenomics
PublicHealthLabs
@APHL
APHL.org
Spring 2020 LAB MATTERS 9