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High-Tech Health Lab Focused On New Risks
ST. PAUL (AP) - It’s one of the most secure places in Minnesota: A lab
chamber built to grow cultures of highly contagious bird flu. Only six people
have both the FBI clearance and the keycards to enter.
Even top state lab officials can’t get in and must view the room by closed-circuit
TV. Clinical lab manager John Besser jokes that they watch workers inside “in
case they have a heart attack.”
“
You wouldn’t hear them scream,” he said.
Welcome to the heart of the Minnesota Public Health Laboratory, a $60 million
state-of-the-art facility that helps the state keep its edge in public health.
Its 140 scientists from the state health and agriculture departments are known
for their speed in tracing outbreaks to their source and for ferreting out
diseases that might otherwise have gone unexplained.
Lab workers played a critical role in singling out jalapenos as the likely
culprit in a nationwide salmonella outbreak. Their tests turned up the same
genetic signature
for salmonella in the state, leading disease investigators to a restaurant
that liberally used a jalapeno garnish.
The lab - just blocks from the arena where Republicans will hold their national
convention this month - is also on the front lines of defending the state against
biological or chemical terrorist attacks. Along with New York, California and
Wisconsin, it is one of 10 state labs advanced enough to perform the same chemical
screening as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - a capacity
not yet fully tested.
There’s also a secure area where researchers examine air filters for signs
of bioterrorism, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “BioWatch” program.
Donna Knutson, the CDC’s acting head of state and local readiness, said
so far no positive results have turned up in Minnesota.
Lab officials were eager to show off the high-tech facility, where windows
onto lab rooms revealed researchers in white coats working over chessboards
of tiny
test tubes, cards with newborn babies’ blood spots and vials of water
and other substances.
Some lab staff will put in extra hours during the convention, with other
workers on standby if needed.
Assistant Health Commissioner Norman Crouch, a former lab director, said
finding the money to maintain the lab’s work is a worry. Running the
lab costs about $17 million a year, including about $4 million from the federal
government.
But federal funding has been declining while costs are rising.
Lab Director Joanne Bartkus and others said the work has improved the public’s
health:
• Recently the lab performed genetic tests to identify a virus responsible
for a series of foodborne illnesses in Oregon - a relatively rare type of sapovirus.
Tests in another, smaller outbreak in Minnesota found the even rarer Saffold
virus, which researchers in California and Illinois are now studying.
•
Lab work helped rule out an infection when slaughterhouse workers who worked
with pig brains in Austin, MN, developed a neurological illness in 2006 and 2007.
Barkus said the operating theory now is that the pork tissue triggered the workers’ immune
systems.
• Lab tests confirmed in 2005 that an Amish infant in Minnesota was
infected with polio virus that came from a vaccine. Scientists also confirmed
the polio
virus
in four other Amish children. None developed paralytic polio.
Minnesota’s reputation as a public health leader precedes the new lab
building, but work in the old health lab was hampered by its 1969 surroundings
near the
University of Minnesota. The old agriculture lab operated across town in a
converted office building, and authorities moved into the new lab in 2005.
“
Frankly it was a nightmare to maintain,” said former state Rep. Fran
Bradley, a Republican from Rochester who said support for the new lab was
bipartisan when
funding passed in 2002.
Former state epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said the streamlined new lab
building is only as good as the people who work there - and they’re leaders
in their field. He said he recruited lab talent in the 1990s with the goal
of making the
facility top-flight, like it was in the 1930s and 1940s.
“
This laboratory provides a critical tool in our human understanding of microorganisms
and in particular in our fight against those that cause disease,” said
Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota.
Scott Becker, head of the Association of Public Health Laboratories in Silver
Spring, MD, said he has told officials from other states they could learn
from Minnesota’s lab.
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