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(Repeats story issued on April 4 with no changes to text.)
By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The Association of Public Health Laboratories sent a letter on Friday asking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to restore two national laboratories that did testing for rare forms of hepatitis and drug-resistant sexually transmitted diseases, the group told Reuters
The labs were part of the cuts this week at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"These two labs are effectively closed. The services they do are no longer available to our nation," said Scott Becker, chief executive officer of APHL, which represents state and local public health laboratories across the country, in an interview.
The labs, which were part of the CDC's Division of STD Prevention and the Division of Viral Hepatitis, conducted national testing services "that do not exist anywhere else within the HHS agencies," according to the letter addressed to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and seen by Reuters.
HHS did not respond directly to a question about the decision to close the labs but said broadly that HHS was restructuring and would keep critical programs in a new operation structure. The official did not say whether the two public health labs were considered critical.
The STD prevention lab was the national lead for testing and tracing outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, such as one that occurred in a 2023 outbreak in Massachusetts, he said.
The lab also conducted testing for new drug-resistant strains of STDs and developed national testing guidelines for diseases including chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis.
The CDC lab that tests for viral hepatitis was the world's leading viral hepatitis lab, according to APHL, and set lab testing standards for all U.S. labs.
According to Becker, the lab was involved in testing samples from a current outbreak of viral hepatitis in Florida, and lab samples taken from patients were in transit when the lab was shuttered this week.
"They're just sitting there right now," he said, adding that additional cases could be missed. "We're losing time."
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; editing by Diane Craft)
