Ute, a CDC laboratory specialist, works on viruses like Ebola.
cdc.gov - August 18, 2014
The Most Important Test in West Africa
When a person in West Africa suddenly has a fever, how do you know whether it’s Ebola or something else? When an Ebola patient gets better, how do you know when that person is no longer infectious to others?
To get answers to both questions, you need a laboratory equipped with state of the art equipment. To get those urgently needed answers quickly, that lab ideally would be located close to an Ebola treatment center.
It sounds difficult to build such a safe, sophisticated lab in a major city – and seems nearly impossible in the remote parts of Africa where Ebola outbreaks occur – but CDC has done it for other outbreaks and is doing it now in West Africa. CDC mobile labs equipped with real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) equipment already are being set up next to West African Ebola treatment centers.
And Ute, a CDC expert, heads up the teams going with them. When she’s not traveling to remote regions of the world, she’s at CDC headquarters in Atlanta working to speed diagnosis of the world’s worst viruses.
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