Julie Appleby, Kaiser Health News
In a heated change late final month on CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper pressed Adm. Brett Giroir, the Health and Human Services assistant secretary who oversees COVID testing efforts for the Trump administration, on why the federal government isn’t requiring industrial labs to extend testing capability so as to velocity turnaround time.
Giroir’s response described a collection of steps — some uncommon — being taken by the federal authorities. One focus was on the function veterinary labs, together with these with particular certification, may play in serving to to construct capability. “Five veterinary labs have their CLIA certification to officially test human patients,” he mentioned. “There are a lot of labs who are doing surveillance testing that don’t need the CLIA certification.”
He was referring to certification below the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988, a federal regulation that units the usual for labs that take a look at human specimens.
So that acquired us questioning: Can labs that take a look at cattle, chickens or your pet Fido run checks on people? And, in that case, what function are they taking part in within the nationwide pandemic, and the way a lot is it serving to?
After all, the problem of increasing lab capability will doubtless come up repeatedly as demand for testing will increase with mounting case counts. Turnaround instances at some labs have grown, with outcomes now taking days to greater than per week in some areas, irritating customers and public well being officers. Delays for take a look at outcomes imply delays for contact tracing and quarantining. The administration’s pandemic response, together with testing points, can be proving to be a sizzling matter on the marketing campaign path.
We reached out to HHS for extra details about Giroir’s assertion.
An HHS spokesperson emailed an inventory of 9 veterinary labs which have obtained the required certification to do patient-specific human testing, saying Giroir had been mistakenly briefed earlier than the interview that there have been solely 5. A U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson mentioned there are 15 National Animal Health Laboratory Network services nationwide which have CLIA certification to check human samples. Clearly, there are vet labs within the U.S. with the required credentials, however the precise quantity is a matter of confusion.
As for the surveillance efforts, the HHS spokesperson didn’t present particular examples of veterinary labs doing such work however supplied a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services FAQ saying labs that don’t have CLIA certification can do some sorts of surveillance if outcomes should not given to particular sufferers.
Similar Science, Same Machines
Our consultants all shortly famous that veterinary labs — particularly these that concentrate on meals animals, together with cows, pigs and chickens, have lengthy examined for illnesses, together with many sorts of coronaviruses.
They’re looking out for microbes that may have an effect on meals security, comparable to salmonella or E. coli, or illnesses that may devastate the animals themselves, together with avian influenza, hoof and mouth illness or African swine fever.
Hence, a number of testing goes on within the 63 food-animal testing labs in 33 states and 4 Canadian provinces accredited by the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians, mentioned its government director, David Zeman.
“In some states, we have more capacity in the vet labs than in the public health labs,” he added.
Those vet labs, typically affiliated with universities or authorities companies, use extremely refined gear, together with polymerase chain response (PCR) strategies, as do labs specializing in human testing. Many of the COVID tests being accomplished are PCR, which may detect the virus’s genetic materials.
“It’s the same machines, the same science,” mentioned Zeman.
However, these are giant, full-service labs that deal primarily with cattle, totally different from the smaller labs typically discovered at your neighborhood vet. So, sorry, Fido.
A Different Regulatory Chain of Command
Earlier this 12 months, researchers at Iowa State University discovered that the testing course of for the brand new coronavirus is much like that used to check pigs for porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) virus, a illness that killed hundreds of piglets in 2013. Because a number of labs had up to date their gear and processes so they may test for PED, they had been in place to help with COVID-19 testing.
Except, in fact, it’s by no means that easy.
While the science and expertise are the identical, the executive necessities should not.
Veterinary labs should meet requirements for accreditation by such teams because the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians and are overseen by federal and state agricultural companies.
Human labs additionally should meet strict requirements, together with CLIA, and fall below the auspices of different companies, together with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One requirement is that the CLIA lab should have a director who’s a medical physician with specialised expertise. Most animal labs are run by, not surprisingly, veterinarians, typically ones with Ph.D.s. Some vet labs have shaped partnerships with CLIA-certified labs to clear this hurdle. Still, it’s a course of that may take weeks, so it’s not an in a single day repair, mentioned Zeman.
Running the Numbers
But can these labs actually make a distinction within the testing backlog?
A June article on the American Veterinary Medicine Association web site quoted an official in May saying that the then-seven CLIA-certified vet labs had the capability to course of 12,000 PCR samples with a 24-hour turnaround.
Zeman mentioned he despatched out a survey in July to his 63 members in response to an HHS inquiry and located that, on common, every lab — if CLIA-certified — may course of 500 to 1,000 COVID samples a day on high of what it must do to observe animals.
“Multiply that by 60 some labs and you have a rough idea of what they could do,” he mentioned. The math provides as much as no less than 31,500 checks a day.
Currently, greater than 700,000 samples are taken each day and despatched to all sorts of labs — primarily giant industrial and hospital-based services, based on tracking by Johns Hopkins University. The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project notes related testing numbers on the finish of July.
More vet labs collaborating “could ease the burden on these labs, but it doesn’t sound like a game changer in terms of wait times,” mentioned Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Some vet labs are working with public well being labs to “test a specific segment of the population (university students, routine screening of government workers, etc.),” mentioned Michelle Forman, media supervisor for the Association of Public Health Laboratories in an electronic mail. “So it’s not so much taking existing burden off of the public health labs and commercial labs but it is preventing additional burden from being put on them.”
Giroir mentioned “lots” of labs which are non-CLIA licensed labs are serving to by doing analysis or surveillance, however Zeman was not conscious of such efforts by such labs in his group.
Perhaps Giroir was speaking about “pooled testing,” through which a variety of specimens are examined in a batch, speculated Mark Ackermann, director of the Oregon Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon. Under that methodology, if any batch checks constructive, particular person specimens from the batch are then every examined to see who’s constructive.
Ackermann, whose lab has CLIA certification, pointed to a different means vet labs could be serving to: Many are making the liquid wanted for the vials that maintain the swabs taken from sufferers’ nasal passages.
Our Ruling
Giroir was right in saying there are some veterinary labs serving to out with COVID testing.
But even when all 63 accredited food-animal vet labs within the U.S. and Canada had been pressed into processing human COVID checks, an business survey estimates it might improve capability by between 31,500 to 63,000 samples per day. While useful, that will nonetheless be solely a small portion of the greater than 700,000 each day checks being carried out, which some consultants say falls brief of what’s wanted.
Additionally, whereas vet labs are serving to in some methods, Giroir supplied little proof to again up his assertion that “lots” of labs that lack CLIA certification are helping in surveillance efforts.
We fee this assertion Mostly True.
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nationwide well being coverage information service. It is an editorially impartial program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which isn’t affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.