“A Wing and a Prayer” Summary and Analysis of the NAHLN HPAI Exercise Program
Information
Date
April 2009
Summary
To address action items assigned to it in the implementation plan for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, the US Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA-APHIS) initiated an exercise program to examine the integral connections between field actions and laboratory response during an avian influenza outbreak. To carry this out, USDA-APHIS asked CNA to design a tabletop exercise and deliver it to member laboratories of the National Animal Health Laboratory Network (NAHLN). In total, we conducted 38 exercises from February to October 2008. The exercises involved more than 700 participants, representing 45 States and numerous Federal, State, and local agencies as well as the poultry industry. USDA-APHIS further asked CNA to examine the lessons learned from this exercise series to conduct a system-wide analysis of the NAHLN. To do so, we examined three main themes that were discussed in detail at all of the NAHLN exercises: laboratory operations, laboratory-field coordination, and notification and communication. Our analysis resulted in recommendations for the coordination of animal health laboratory response capabilities across the United States that address resource management, process alignment, notification and warning, and knowledge management strategies for the NAHLN, it's component laboratories, and their interface with field operations. Overall, we found that all but four of the NAHLN laboratories would have sufficient capacity to handle the first few days of testing for scenarios that were presented in this exercise program. As might be predicted, laboratories in States with a high density of commercial poultry operations were the most likely to quickly receive more samples per day than they could process. However, the reasons for this were somewhat counter-intuitive. The overwhelming number of laboratory samples resulted from outbreak surveillance among commercial farms and marketability testing that far exceeded the testing workload for locations with sick birds. Conversely, once full surveillance of backyard farms was underway, all of the individual laboratories could be overwhelmed with testing of individual birds and small flocks.