Two Battelle employees have helped the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases conduct training for local researchers and teams responding to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Battelle said Monday its staff took part in a 16-day program aimed to train Congolese researchers at the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale in Kinshasa on how to perform serologic detection of immune response to the virus in disease survivors, as well as vaccinated and exposed individuals.
Other training efforts included teaching local response workers on the use of personal protective equipment in containment laboratories and mobile containment units as part of medical countermeasures evaluation.
Ten of Battelle employees who are part of the NIAID Integrated Research Facility response team regularly travel to African countries for up to a month at a time to support the institute’s outbreak response initiatives.
The nonprofit research and development organization also develops field laboratory diagnostics for high consequence pathogens in the IRF’s biosafety level-4 laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
