In August, European scientists were working round the clock at the prestigious Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases in Rome to set up a mobile laboratory soon to be deployed in Ebola-affected villages in West Africa.
This would be the second such lab emerging from the EuropeAid-funded Emlab project, which seeks to establish “three deployable mobile laboratory units for the detection and diagnosis of infectious pathogens up to the highest risk group 4.” The first lab was already set up in Guinea in March, and the third will be made available for training.
However, a number of details were still being worked out in Rome, the most important of which is whether the second mobile lab will be dispatched to Sierra Leone or Liberia, the other two countries affected by the Ebola outbreak that has been crippling West Africa and had caused over 1,000 deaths since March, as of late August.