Steven Hinrichs, discussing development of the clinical laboratory connected to the NBU

31 March 2023

Steven Hinrichs: Actually, we had a lab in the unit in the beginning, but they actually needed that space and the actual number of tests that the laboratory in the unit could perform was so minimal it wasn’t worth keeping up anymore. And another interesting thing happened—so the doctors who we originally had interviewed, Dr. Smith—and said what test do you need us to provide. And it was very similar, they were very simple, “CBC, smear analysis, that’s all we’re going to ask you to provide when we take care of a patient in the unit.” As soon as Ebola actually happened, the doctors said, “If we’re coming into the unit risking our lives, we want as many tests as if this patient was in the ICU of the hospital and don’t tell us you’re only going to give us these five tests. We want every test available.” So now the whole clinical laboratory became involved and we had to develop a method and a process for bringing potentially contaminated samples into the laboratory and running them on automated instruments in the laboratory environment, which was not BL3, and how to develop a containment policy and infection control policy, all those sorts of the things was a very significant challenge.

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives