Grant to help lab better track dangerous diseases

Stephen Curran

Friday, Oct. 29, 2004 | 9:33 a.m.

A laboratory poised to become Southern Nevada's primary testing site for dangerous diseases and bioterrorism agents received a much-needed grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to buy a high-tech cataloging system.

Heidi Sakelarios, program manager for the Public Health Preparedness Program, which distributes money from the CDC, traveled to Las Vegas on Thursday to deliver the $244,000 grant, Annie Uccelli, a spokeswoman for the program, said.

A budget shortfall in August had left the Southern Nevada Public Health Laboratory relying on a hand-written log book to track the dozens of tests conducted at the facility each day.

The previous system wastes untold hours each day as scientists and technicians double- and triple-check each item written, manually highlight documents and scour file cabinets for the paper reports, Patricia Armour, laboratory manager for the Southern Nevada Public Health Laboratory, told the Clark County Health District on Thursday.

"Everything in the lab has to be triple-checked," she said. "Any lab worries about errors, that's why we double- and triple-check. It's a tedious process."

The lab had been banking on the Laboratory Information System, a database that would allow technicians to catalog new cases and search through older reports more quickly, Armour said.

Then in August, funding for the new system was delayed after program managers failed to set aside money within the grant, Armour said. To solve the problem, the CDC created a new subgrant to pay for the system.

It will take another three months for the lab to implement the new system, she said.

The lab, a $2.3 million facility located near Charleston Boulevard and Interstate 15, is seeking certification from the CDC to become a reference-level facility, a designation that would allow the lab to identify and test for diseases and bioterrorism agents.

The CDC is expected to make its final determination in the next two months.

Neither Armour nor Uccelli would say if the new system would be the determining factor in getting the CDC certification, though Uccelli said, "It does help."

The lab opened in May and is now classified as a sentinel-level lab, meaning it can only rule out suspected diseases. The 10 lab technicians on staff now conduct about 15 to 20 HIV tests each day, Armour said.

Nevada's only other reference-level lab is located in Reno, which conducted tests earlier this week that confirmed a suspected Norovirus outbreak at the Flamingo Las Vegas.

The Clark County facility prepared samples that were sent to the state lab, but did not conduct any of the tests in-house, Armour said.