SPADA

Considerations in addition to those of clinical diagnostics…. How to verify authentic agent? Sufficient vs. necessary Culture? Nucleic acid tests • How much of the genome? How to verify infectious risk? Absent a clinically ill human, what is sufficient, what is necessary? How and where to evaluate validate WHO considerations what is sufficient, necessary to have a public safety/health actionable assay result; What should that action be?

Mission of the SPADA Variola Working Group (2014)

• The VariolaWorking Group of the Stakeholder Panel on Agent Detection Assays (SPADA) was tasked to develop voluntary consensus standards required for evaluation of tools that detect Variola from aerosol collection samples. … The standards will : • Support test and evaluation of Variola-detection tools for the BioWatch program • Provide guidance to industry and other capability developers for development of future detection tools that BioWatch may solicit It is expected that any detection result from a tool validated against the SPADA Variola standards will be confirmed by the Poxvirus Laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.