CLINICAL LAB SCIENEC

2
ESSENTIALS OF CLINICAL LABORATORY SCIENCE
use of laboratory techniques along with other medical practices may have arisen
when there was a need to screen large numbers of people who may have been
harboring contagious diseases and who immigrated to the shores of the United
States. Since these humble beginnings of the medical laboratory profession, when
a small building was erected on Ellis Island to perform rudimentary health checks
on immigrants to this country, a perceived need for screening methods for infectious
diseases in such groups has been present. Although laboratory procedures
were not new at this time, the processing of these groups of people with a set
protocol for screening them for infectious diseases may have originated here.
The health screenings at ports of entry to the United States possibly represented
the first efforts by a government agency to provide basic laboratory
procedures of a broad scope. Eventually, these efforts revealed a need for the
training and credentialing of medical laboratory workers to exercise knowledge
and skills for detecting the presence of disease. These efforts, in a sense, initiated
the first attempt to diagnose diseases in persons immigrating to the United States
to prevent contagious diseases from being brought into the country and causing a
catastrophic epidemic. Today, those immigrating to the United States are required
to be free of certain diseases and to have undergone vaccinations before official
entry.
During the early history of our country, those coming across the Atlantic
Ocean to North America spent weeks and months on the high seas, sometimes
confined in the holds of ships. The close proximity of the passengers was quite
effective in fostering the transmission of diseases to other passengers before
reaching the North American shores. The need for protecting our country against
the incursions of contagious diseases that might lead to epidemics soon became
apparent. So the beginnings of clinical testing and possible government influence
began at that time to enforce regulations related to health. Early in the history of
the United States, federal agencies became active in the quest for better health of
the citizens of the United States and protection of them from infectious diseases.
Discoveries by scientists of the time were incorporated into the diagnosis and
treatment of diseases as they became available, and some research was funded by
the federal government. An example of early efforts by the government included
research by Walter Reed, whose name persists through a major U.S. Army military
hospital that is named in his honor.
In the early 19th century, legions of French soldiers were attacked by yellow
fever during the 1802 Haitian Revolution. Large numbers of French soldiers
died as a result of infection by an organism for which the means of transmitting
the disease were not understood. Outbreaks followed by thousands of deaths
also occurred periodically in other locations of what is now the Caribbean and
South America. Research that sometimes included and was fatal to some human
volunteers led to the discovery that transmission to humans occurred chiefly by
the bite of an insect vector, a mosquito, and led to the development of a vaccine
and other preventive efforts in the early 20th century.
In the beginnings of clinical testing to diagnose disease states and to assess
effectiveness of treatment or recovery, the physician performed his own tests in
his office or in the patient’s home. But as the number of diagnostic tests available
and the sophistication of test methods grew, the physician was forced to rely
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