Public Health Laboratories

Meigs, Michelle; Merrick, Riki; Hinrichs, Steven

Public Health Laboratories provide essential services for underserved populations, testing of environmental and animal samples, and detection of emerging diseases. Public Health Laboratories also guard population health by providing diagnostic support for treatment of individual patients in clinical healthcare. Use of information systems to store and analyse lab data and the use of standards to share and aggregate data supports surveillance as well as public health emergency response and disease prevention. These factors help Public Health Laboratories fulfill most of their eleven core functions. Public Health Laboratories exist at the local, state, federal, and international level, and they form networks to enhance their capacity to respond to and protect the population from health threats; these networks include the Laboratory Response Network, the Food Emergency Response Network, and the Antibiotic Resistance Lab Network, among others.