Ebola is not a threat to Chandler. At least not because of a Covance facility locating here. And not through any other biomedical research facility, either. Covance, like all biomedical research facilities, screens animals in quarantine prior to allowing them to be used in research.
A quarantine period for test animals serves two purposes. One is safety-related - assuring that animals have no diseases that threaten other animals or staff members. The other is scientific - to assure that test results are valid and not biased by some underlying disease.
Covance's Chandler facility will be a research facility - not a quarantine facility. Animals will have been cleared as healthy before arriving in Chandler.
The Ebola-infected animals delivered to Covance's Reston, Va., facility some 15 years ago were identified as infected and were destroyed. No Ebola infected animals ever left the quarantine facility to be shipped to research centers. This is how quarantine facilities are supposed to work. They prevent the spread of disease by detecting it early.
Most diseases found in animals are not transmitted to humans. The Reston Ebola strain is one of them. According to the World Health Organization, although the Reston Ebola is highly pathogenic for non-human primates, it has never been found to cause illness in a human.
So the lessons learned from the Ebola saga is that 1) Covance's quarantine process is a model of how a quarantine process should work and 2) no human illness was ever caused by that virus.
Roberta Reed, Ph.D.
Sun Lakes |
