Reading the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases each month provides insight into the widespread occurrence of emerging infections in Australia and the rest of the world. The relatively cheap availability of airfares to exotic locations and frequency of travel, forecast to be 3.6 billion passengers by 2016 up from 2.8 billion passengers carried in 2011 provide the means of rapid transport of potentially infected individuals around the globe. The incubation period of infection for risk group level 3 and 4 pathogens is usually between 2-21 days. This period can allow a window of opportunity for travellers to be infected and not show symptoms until they return home. In 2009 this was dramatically demonstrated with the spread of H1N1 influenza virus to at least 74 countries in just 2 months, infecting millions of people.
The current on-going and hopefully now contained outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa has resulted in over 26,000 people infected and more than 11,000 deaths. In caring for patients, more than 800 health care workers (HCW’s) have been infected and more than 500 have died. An international effort has been instrumental in containing this outbreak. The return home of travellers to West Africa and infected and non-infected HCW’s taking part in the international effort has raised concern in some communities and resulted in the institution of various processes including; health questionnaires for returning travellers, health monitoring of HCW’s and in some cases home quarantine.
Laboratory investigation of emerging infections that may include cultivation of the infectious agent for identification and characterisation must be performed in a high containment laboratory. In this presentation I will summarise some of the pathogens of concern and show how laboratory investigations are performed to identify the causative agent.