Four States Urge CDC to Reconsider Validating High-Volume Measles Test, Warning Refusal Weakens Outbreak Response
Washington: Health officials from California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington have written jointly to Erica Schwartz, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), asking the agency to reconsider its refusal to validate a high-throughput measles testing method and to develop an assay that state laboratories can use. (GSM, based on reporting by The Guardian and The New York Times)
According to the letter, health officials in California and Washington formally asked the CDC in May to validate a new way of testing for measles. After waiting two months, the CDC denied the request, citing “other competing priorities” and saying it could not dedicate time to making a high-volume test available to state laboratories. “If a large outbreak were to occur in our region, without high-throughput capacity, it would be more difficult to scale up diagnostic testing appropriately, impairing patient care and public health investigation,” the officials wrote. Such a test, they said, would “dramatically strengthen” laboratories' ability to respond quickly to outbreaks and would also help preparedness for known pathogens such as Ebola and hantavirus, as well as emerging threats.
Public health laboratories currently rely on lower-volume individual PCR tests for measles. During the Covid-19 pandemic, most public health labs bought high-throughput equipment such as Hologic's Panther Fusion platform, which can process up to 500 tests in eight hours, but no high-throughput measles test has been published or validated by the CDC. The letter also noted that Texas state laboratories developed their own high-volume measles test during an outbreak in west Texas last year, but the protocol has not been distributed or published. The CDC has reportedly studied the Texas test and one from ARUP Laboratories, but the four states' officials said those studies “were not full validations or a comprehensive comparison.” The alliance is asking the CDC to develop an assay for the Panther Fusion and publish the protocol so any laboratory can run it.
Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said the CDC is “ensuring state and local health departments have the support needed to strengthen measles detection and outbreak response” and is “prioritizing emerging technologies” to respond to the current measles outbreak. She did not answer whether the agency plans to validate a high-throughput measles assay. Schwartz took up the CDC directorship in August, shortly after the states received the agency's reply.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于Atlanta的疾控中心CDC Roybal园区17号楼（资料图）。美国疾控中心公共领域图片，经维基共享资源。Photo: CDC Building 17 at the Roybal Campus in Atlanta (file photo). U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
