Washington D.C. Lab Messed Up Hundreds Of Zika Tests

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Officials in Washington, D.C.’s public health laboratory had to repeat Zika tests for nearly 300 pregnant women, including two women who were mistakenly told they tested negative for the mosquito-borne virus that has been shown to cause birth defects. A routine check of lab practices in December revealed that all of the lab’s Zika tests were coming back negative, raising concerns about their accuracy, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. CDC experts, who have been working with the lab since mid-January, discovered that technicians doing Zika testing were skipping a step, causing all of the test results to be negative, said Dr. Wendi Kuhnert-Tallman, who co-leads the CDC’s Zika lab task force. The faulty tests were performed between July 14 and Dec. 14 of 2016, the lab said in a statement on its website. A total of 409 specimens were sent for re-testing, including samples from 294 pregnant women. CDC is re-testing all 294 of the samples from pregnant women, and the remaining 115 tests from men and non-pregnant women were sent to other CDC-approved public health labs. So far, the D.C. lab said it has received 62 test results from pregnant women back from the CDC. Of these, 60 tested negative and two tested positive. Confirmatory tests were only able to determine that the women had been recently infected with a flavivirus, a family of viruses that includes Zika, dengue and Chikungunya. ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news