Molecular methods provide public health laboratories with powerful new tools to conduct population-based surveillance to detect and investigate outbreaks of infectious disease. Using such methods, public laboratories can now generate data that make epidemiological investigations rapid, focused, and cost-effective. But this public health success requires more than just the generation of sophisticated molecular data. It also takes cooperation and coordination with clinical laboratories in the private sector to provide specimens and microbial isolates for the public health laboratory to analyze; it takes rapid, real-time analysis of these clinical materials by the public health laboratory; it takes reporting of the molecular data in a creative format that makes it readily useful to the epidemiologists; and it takes rapid, real-time epidemiological investigation of the outbreak cases suggested by the laboratory data. In essence, it requires a strong working partnership between the laboratory that provides the data and the epidemiologists that use it. In this presentation, a partnership like this in Minnesota will be described with examples of how it has resulted in effective surveillance and epidemiological investigation.
Learning Objectives: To learn about the molecular methods that provide public health laboratories with powerful new tools to conduct population-based surveillance to detect and investigate outbreaks of infectious disease.
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.