[Security laboratory facilitates the management of infections like Ebola]

Ebola and MERS are contagious diseases with high mortality, and separate handling of blood samples in the laboratory is necessary. Most people who arrive in Sweden with suspicious symptoms will likely have other diseases than Ebola/MERS, for example malaria or pneumococci, but we still need to take care of these patients and be able to provide optimal treatment of electrolyte disturbances, kidney failure, bleedings etc. In this report, we describe how we solved the problem in Skåne, where we built a security laboratory within the facilities of Clinical Chemistry in Malmö. Here we can now analyze malaria, blood gases, cell counts, PK-value, liver status, pneumococci and legionella as well as perform routine pre-transfusion testing. We describe the different point-of-care instruments that are used in the laboratory and the reasoning behind our choices, as well as challenges that we encountered on the way.