saskatchewan disease control laboratory -
more than just diagnostics

The new Saskatchewan Disease Control Laboratory (SDCL) building at 5 Research Drive in Regina is a welcome addition to Innovation Place, but what, you may wonder, actually goes on behind the new glass and stone walls? 

Dr. Greg Horsman, Medical Director for SDCL sums it up this way. "The public health system of Saskatchewan is a network of teams working with a common goal to protect and enhance the health of the general public. This consists of the Medical Health Officers and their teams in the health regions and the Population Health team from the Ministry of Health, as well as the SDCL.”

Since communicable diseases can be spread through a wide variety of means, SDCL has a long list of the types of tests they perform. Along with the publicly accessible water sample testing, SDCL provides services to health facilities which don’t have their own laboratories, providing diagnostic tests for bacterial, viral, fungal and parasitic infections. Using DNA-based molecular technologies, they detect, identify and keep track of a wide variety of infectious diseases. Sometimes, they find things they’re not even looking for and which leads to interesting research programs.

For example, the Section Manager of Molecular Diagnostics at SDCL, Dr. Nick Antonishyn, recently co-authored a scientific paper identifying a genotype of the human papillomavirus with a higher risk of causing cervical cancer than previous studies around the world. This finding in Saskatchewan women has since been confirmed by other studies across Canada and other parts of the world and could have implications for monitoring vaccine efficacy. “Even though we are a public health lab and a service lab first, we do come across unusual things that haven’t been identified before,” says Horsman.

Another example occurred during last year’s H1N1 epidemic, when the SDCL identified an unusual strain of influenza. “We found three cases from people who were working in a pig barn where the virus was behaving differently than the flu strain in widespread circulation,” said Horsman. It turned out to be a unique strain, the first time a new flu strain was identified in Saskatchewan. Horsman adds, “This is exciting stuff for microbiologists.” 

Horsman says the opportunity to explore these types of unexpected discoveries encourages the molecular biologists and chemists to stretch their knowledge base and keeps everyone on their toes.

“This type of applied research is part of the culture we’ve created and it leads to medical health officers asking more questions because they know we will really look into things,” says Horsman. “SARS emphasized the important role public health laboratories have in looking for new and emerging pathogens, so it’s good to keep up research and development so we keep getting better at detecting unusual things.”

For more information about the Saskatchewan Disease Control Laboratory, please go to www.health.gov.sk.ca/lab

- August 2010