Bloomberg News reports that the United States has planned to initiate testing for Monkeypox at the nation’s five of the biggest commercial laboratories, thereby broadening the efforts beyond just the government facilities. This is an effort to attend to the surging cases, as stated on Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services stated on Wednesday.
Healthcare providers will be using the testing services at the beginning of July, and more tests will be available as per HHS throughout the month. The names of the commercial laboratories that will be able to receive the tests and have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration are Mayo Clinic Laboratories, Aegis Science, Quest Diagnostics, Labcorp, and Sonic Healthcare.
In a statement, the Secretary of HHS, Xavier Becerra, revealed that by remarkably increasing the number of the testing areas across the nation, it is being made possible for every individual who intends to undergo the test.
The news came in once the experts expressed their concern that the United States was repeating the same mistake as it did in the initial days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when testing was crippled by the strains in supply and regulatory hiccups, resulting in delays to respond to the crisis. The health professionals have stated that US testing was inadequate, making it impossible to assess the pace at which Monkeypox is spreading.
As per HHS, there have been 142 confirmed cases across the 24 states and in Washington D.C, in the US. Worldwide, more than 3300 confirmed cases have been reported, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Bloomberg News reports that all the tests earlier required to go through the government network of the labs, and experts have said that it is a cumbersome process and might lead to delays in the identification of new cases or miss out on a wide community spread.
The HHS has also revealed that it is working in tandem with the CDC to improve the production of the FDA-cleared tests and help the hospitals to be able to make their tests of high quality. The CDC has earlier published the FDA granted testing protocol for those laboratories that expressed their interest in developing tests for Monkeypox. It has also authorized using additional reagents and automation to increase the capacity for testing of laboratories using the CDC test, as per a statement released by the HHS reports Bloomberg News.
The CDC has said that the healthcare providers must test any individual having a rash similar to the rash of the characteristic Monkeypox and be on alert to check for similar infections such as in case of herpes and syphilis.
