ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Rows of insulated seafood boxes are lined up in a spare room at the new Alaska Environmental Health Laboratory in Anchorage.
Instead of fish, they’re packed with field kits destined for the Alaska bush, where crews will net and sample migrating birds for bird flu.
Cherie Rice, normally a state dairy inspector, used her spare time Friday to pack the boxes with four sizes of bright yellow protective plastic suits “because people come in all variety of sizes,” she said. She’s also added gloves, goggles, swabs, disinfectant solution and sample boxes to the kits.
“We’re just sending out a little bit of everything,” she said.
The field crews – comprised of government biologists, volunteers and contractors – will return the smaller boxes with vials of samples taken by swabs from live birds. Some boxes also could contain dead birds to be tested if there is an unexplained die-off.
The laboratory is the state’s latest defense on the front lines of the fight against bird flu.
Scientists believe the first reported case of the Asian H5N1 virus in the United States will likely show up in Alaska, brought by migratory birds arriving from Russia or Southeast Asia.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is preparing to authorize the lab to test samples from migrating waterfowl – as many as 10,000 this spring. It could well be the busiest lab in a network of 43 labs around the nation that will test for presumptive findings of the virus.
Barb Martin, the National Animal Health Laboratory Network coordinator in Ames, Iowa, is working with the Alaska lab on its certification.
“Because of Alaska’s position with migratory bird patterns, I think we can anticipate they will receive more samples and sooner than other states,” she said by telephone.
If an initial finding is positive, the National Veterinary Services Lab in Ames will determine if the disease is a high or low pathogenic strain of the virus.
State veterinarian Bob Gerlach said staff members in Anchorage has “been through the grinder” to prove to the USDA that they can run a quality lab with the proper protocols in place to protect the samples and the staff from contamination.
Sara Watt, the lab’s head microbiologist, went through trial testing Friday to prove her expertise in detecting the virus. Lab officials could learn as early as next week if they have been certified.
“The pressure’s on Sara because they said, ‘OK, here’s your unknown.’ It’s kind of like your big final exam,” Gerlach said.
The state has purchased specialized equipment for the lab, which will provide faster and more efficient testing than the old method of growing cultures in petri dishes. The equipment also is used for testing such things as salmonella, E. coli and paralytic shellfish poisoning.
Watt estimates she will be able to process about 200 avian samples in a three-day period.
Even with the fast turnaround, final confirmation from the Ames lab of a virulent form of the disease could take one to two weeks, Martin said. In a priority case involving a high bird die-off, more testing and surveillance would occur simultaneously.
The Anchorage lab will test samples collected by the USDA and the state Department of Fish and Game. The National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., also will test samples collected in Alaska by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
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