GLOBAL HEALTH
done before,” Reisdorf said. The lab was
able to share viruses with WHO and CDC
and started surveillance for non-influenza
respiratory pathogens.
the world helps provide WHO with better
data for vaccine strain selection.
PCR’s rapid detection of novel influenza
viruses also offers a sort of early warning
system. The importance of such global
surveillance became painfully evident
during the 2009 influenza pandemic,
which “kind of caught everyone by
surprise. It seemed to emerge from
nowhere and suddenly was a global
pandemic,” Reisdorf said. “The aim is to
be able to detect these strains earlier and
perhaps put in place some mitigation
measures.”
Lasting Change
Building Global Laboratory
Capacity
In more recent years, Reisdorf has
provided mentorship for public health
laboratories in southeastern Europe and
western Africa through a WHO/CDC/
APHL collaborative training program
aimed at increasing laboratory quality and
technical expertise in influenza testing.
Countries lacking in laboratory capacity
can lead to data reporting gaps, he said.
Through the mentoring program,
Reisdorf worked closely with Bosnia
and Herzegovina’s two public health
labs for two years, helping the staff
develop laboratory quality procedures
and influenza diagnostic testing capacity.
“The labs did all of the work,” he said.
“We were just providing the support and
guidance.” Some of the participating
labs in Southeast Europe even received
National Influenza Center designation
from WHO, “a really key achievement of
that mentorship program,” he said.
Such programs show the lasting impact
of global health partnerships based on
sharing knowledge and building regional
laboratory capacity. Many programs that
purport to boost global health efforts fail
to account for the local environment,
resources and needs of recipient
laboratories, Diallo said. Donations of
equipment, reagents or other supplies,
no matter how well intentioned, may be
of limited utility if the lab lacks reliable
electricity or refrigeration.
For meaningful and sustainable change,
Diallo lauds APHL’s long-term vision
and efforts such as its “Foundations of
Laboratory Leadership and Management”
course, originally developed more than
a dozen years ago with PEPFAR support
to improve organizational structure and
management skills in African public
health laboratories. Another example is
APHL’s laboratory twinning program,
which matches a laboratory with
particular needs from an under-resourced
country with an established laboratory
with expertise relevant to those needs.
While director of the public health
laboratory in Washington, DC, Diallo
oversaw a twinning relationship with the
national health and quality assurance
laboratory in Tanzania to help set up
virology training programs and an ELISA
system.
Blevins has also seen first-hand the
impact of sharing knowledge and good
laboratory practices. During a two-year
mentorship in Rwanda, she learned
that pipette calibration was a hurdle.
She connected the laboratorians with a
colleague in her San Antonio lab, who
taught them how to test and calibrate
their pipettes in-house. “Now they can
be self-sufficient,” she said. “Even such
a small thing affects testing and helped
overall with their program.”
“It’s been wonderful to work with people
who share the same goals. It doesn’t
matter what lab, what country you work
in,” Reisdorf said. “We’re all trying to
achieve the same outcomes.” n
When the program expanded to Africa in
2017, Reisdorf became a mentor to Sierra
Leone’s public health laboratory, which
faced severe resource shortages and was
not able to perform influenza testing.
“At the end of the program in 2019, the
test system was working, they were able
to report test results and characterize
influenza viruses. And, very importantly,
they had begun reporting their data
to WHO every week. That was a huge
accomplishment because that hadn’t been
Kim Lewis and Frances Downes work with public health laboratory stakeholders in Jakarta, Indonesia to develop plans to
implement the public health network strategic plan. Photo: Frances Downes
PublicHealthLabs
@APHL
APHL.org
Winter 2020 LAB MATTERS
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