A simple undergraduate laboratory exercise for teaching the role of sentinel-level clinical microbiology testing in biological threat identification

Abstract

Undergraduate students in the biomedical sciences are mostly unaware of how clinical microbiology laboratories handle suspected agents of bioterrorism or emerging infectious diseases. The Public Health Security Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 requires the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to maintain a list of microbes that pose serious biological threats to human health and safety, including Tier 1 agents with the potential for use in bioterrorism. The Laboratory Response Network (LRN), founded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Association of Public Health Laboratories, coordinates the response of sentinel, reference, and national laboratories to these biothreats. The sentinel laboratories, which comprise most hospital-based and commercial laboratories, are the first to encounter a suspicious agent. For this reason, the LRN has published a series of testing guidelines to assist the sentinel laboratories in deciding whether a microbial isolate should be considered potentially hazardous and thus sent to a reference or national laboratory for further characterization. Here, we describe a simple laboratory exercise that teaches sentinel-level testing requirements in the context of an applied setting of a potential outbreak of anthrax that would require a sentinel laboratory to recognize a potential threat, attempt to rule it out, and refer to a national laboratory for identification.