Lab errors put lives at risk in Ebola crisis
US firm botched crucial test results as 2014 outbreak took hold in Sierra Leone
AN AMERICAN company assigned a key role in the efforts to battle Ebola in Sierra Leone made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 outbreak. Staffers with the San Francisco-based company, Metabiota, not only misread the epidemic, they contributed to botched lab results, undermined partners and put people at risk of the terrifying virus.
The company had been tapped by the World Health Organisation and the Sierra Leonean government to help fight Ebola. But internal e-mails from WHO and other international health agencies show top scientists were alarmed at problems in a lab shared by Metabiota and Tulane University.
“This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” WHO outbreak expert Dr Eric Bertherat told colleagues in July 2014. Bertherat relayed reports of “total confusion” in the government lab split between Metabiota and Tulane at the Kenema hospital in Sierra Leone, noting there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done”. He said the flubbed results were particularly dangerous given suspicion among the local population that international workers were spreading Ebola deliberately.
Metabiota chief executive officer and founder Nathan Wolfe said no evidence shows his company was responsible for the lab blunders and that the reported squabbles were overblown.
He said Metabiota doesn’t specialise in outbreak response and that his employees performed admirably amid the carnage of the world’s biggest-ever Ebola outbreak.
Metabiota’s problems mirror the wider mismanagement that hamstrung the world’s response to Ebola, which has killed upward of 11 000 people. WHO resisted sounding the alarm over Ebola for two months on political, religious and economic grounds and failed to put together a decisive response even after the alert was issued.
Metabiota and its non-profit sister company, Global Viral, have received millions from the US Department of Defence, USAID, Google and the California-based Skoll Foundation.
In the early months of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, authorities in Sierra Leone turned to Metabiota to help respond to the epidemic. At first, the firm appeared to be doing well. Its website said company staffers helped to train hundreds of health workers.
But within weeks, the virus exploded across the country and, as the death toll mounted, experts began questioning the work being done at the lab in Kenema.
Gary Kobinger, head of special pathogens at the Public Health Agency of Canada, double-checked some of the facility’s work in mid-July, and found worrying discrepancies in four of eight tests and identified as many as five people wrongly diagnosed with Ebola. The mistakes sparked concern about bigger problems in the lab.
WHO staffer Pat Drury reported that Metabiota and Tulane did not meet international biosecurity standards.
Metabiota and Tulane blamed each other for the mistakes.
US health official Austin Demby reported that the lab lacked an ultraviolet light for decontamination and didn’t have enough space to process blood samples safely. He found the shared lab a mess. “The cross contamination potential is huge and quite frankly unacceptable,” he noted.