Sewell cautions that figure diminished as private labs got up to speed in the state, but it’s still a significant and necessary role. In the first couple of days, the animal lab’s contributions practically doubled COVID-19 testing in Oklahoma. “We’ve gone from not thinking about this at all to a functioning laboratory in about 12-13 days,” he says. Sewell says a task force set about making it happen and then things took off quickly. In fact, even with how similar the diagnostic work is, including the qualifications and training of the people who work in the labs, Sewell says there was never any plan or expectation that the animal lab would get drafted into service for a human disease outbreak.īut when Oklahoma state officials called upon the public research universities to band together and brainstorm ways to fight COVID-19, one thing that emerged, as it had in Iowa, was the realization that the animal lab was uniquely positioned to ease the burden on the state’s public health system. It allows the animal lab to help with other human conditions in the future, though there aren’t currently any such plans. But Sewell says the certification isn’t limited to the current crisis. The fast-track certification obviously came in response to COVID-19 and with the intention of increasing Oklahoma’s statewide testing capacity. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the animal diagnostic labs, and cooperation from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the OADDL can now test human samples.
“Turns out, not all animals are humans, but all humans are animals,” says Kenneth Sewell, who oversees OADDL as the vice president for research at Oklahoma State University.
The Oklahoma Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab (OADDL) has perhaps gone the farthest the fastest to support testing for COVID-19. Similar collaborations are happening around the country. Very quickly the testing capacity for the COVID-19 virus in Iowa increased. Main says his team in Ames packed some up and sent them to Iowa City, where staff at the State Hygienic Lab were already trained and could use them right away. Both rely on two key tools, the KingFisher 96 high throughput nucleic acid extraction instrument and a real-time PCR testing machine, the ABI 7500.
In some cases, the exact same machines are now testing human samples.Īfter the initial call regarding the pandemic, Main says it became obvious how the vet lab could help the public health lab. The sophisticated DNA testing process used for PED, which is a coronavirus, is the same as what public health labs are now using for COVID-19. (Older pigs would get sick, recover, and gain some immunity to it. PED spread from the Midwest across much of the country, eventually killing millions of piglets. Before veterinarians could get a handle on it, The disease was known to exist abroad but had never been in the United States before 2013, when piglets started dying of dehydration after they didn’t respond to treatment or recover as they would have from other illnesses. That’s what was going on at the Iowa State vet lab when researchers identified the porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) virus. At diagnostic labs, staff work around the clock processing samples, confirming the genetics of the virus and trying to re-trace its spread. It’s fatal to some, only a few days of illness for others. This might sound familiar: a coronavirus is spreading fast through a population. Credit Amy Mayer / IPR file Partnerships fostered between the vet diagnostic lab and the State Hygienic Lab because of COVID-19 could lead to additional collaborations in the future, says Rodger Main, director of the Iowa State Veterinary Diagnostic Lab.
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