What's New
Posted on Friday, August 7, 2020
One Health is an approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of the health of people, animals, and the environment. It involves collaboration across human and animal health, environment, and other relevant sectors. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have developed the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them and are an important One Health issue. Today, advanced molecular detection technologies, such as whole genome sequencing (WGS), allow scientists to study how antibiotic resistance evolves and spreads. WGS also provides important information for responding to disease outbreaks. In a 2015–2018 outbreak of multidrug-resistant Salmonella Heidelberg, WGS revealed that the outbreak in people was connected to contact with dairy calves and calf environments.
Posted on Thursday, July 30, 2020
The CDC and APHL Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Quality Initiative released the next set of ready-to-implement tools and documents. Adding to the collection of documents for Illumina Miseq, Oxford Nanopore’s MinION, and ThermoFisher’s Ion Torrent, this set of products includes SOPs for training personnel on Illumina’s MiniSeq and NextSeq. Additionally, this set provides tools and documents for two new Quality System Essentials (QSEs): Information Management and Assessment. Within this release are documents on best practices for documenting bioinformatic pipelines to support reproducibility under the Information Management QSE. This release also contains documents on identifying, developing, and applying key performance indicators to your sequencing assays and a Quality Management System Internal Assessment Tool to help laboratories assess compliance with quality system recommendations under the Assessment QSE.
Posted on Monday, March 9, 2020
A molecular biologist with CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria (DPDM), Eldin Talundzic, PhD, recently returned from Peru, where he taught researchers to identify molecular markers associated with drug-resistant malaria using Advanced Molecular Detection (AMD) technologies. The training was part of CDC’s Malaria Resistance Surveillance project, or MaRS, which aims to develop and implement AMD tools in the U.S. and global partner laboratories to help identify and track drug-resistant malaria. The goal is to standardize and accelerate the flow of data used to track drug resistance, making it easier for decision makers to shape their malaria prevention and treatment guidance.
Posted on Thursday, January 30, 2020
The National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS), a public health surveillance system, tracks antibiotic-resistant bacteria that cause gastrointestinal and foodborne illness. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS), a new technology, has made this task easier. WGS lets scientists rapidly predict whether bacteria are resistant to antibiotics based on genetic information. In 2018, this information helped make the important distinction between two outbreaks occurring at the same time so public health officials could respond to each more effectively.
Posted on Wednesday, January 15th, 2020
To accompany a New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) special report, Pathogen Genomics in Public Healthexternal iconexternal icon, the Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (AMD) released a video, “Transforming Disease Detection,” which gives a brief introduction to next-generation sequencing (NGS) and explains how this technology can help solve outbreaks that, in the past, would not have been detectable.