After 60 years of operating here, the state closed its Tucson Regional Public Health Laboratory on Friday, and now county health officials are scrambling for alternatives.
The lab mainly processed rabies, HIV and sexually transmitted disease tests for Pima and Yuma counties. It was also instrumental in early testing for the West Nile virus, Pima County Health Department spokeswoman Patti Woodcock said Friday.
The result could be added costs for transporting lab samples to Phoenix and longer wait times for getting results, but Woodcock said no one knows for certain at this point.
"We're concerned," Woodcock said. "We've never been faced with this situation. We're now looking at ways to transport our lab tests to Phoenix with an overnight courier. Our anticipation is that it will create a problem; we just don't know how much of a problem."
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The doors of the lab, which cost $350,000 per year to operate, closed Friday afternoon. The four-employee lab, which opened in 1949 underneath the University of Arizona's football stadium, had been at its current location, 416 W. Congress St., since 1969.
"This is a sad time for the folks that currently work in the Tucson lab, but also for the folks over the years that provided testing and diagnostic services," Arizona Department of Health Services interim director Will Humble said in a memo this week.
In an interview Friday, Humble said two of the employees will commute to jobs with the lab in Phoenix and that the other two have opted to look for work in Tucson.
"The main things they were doing were the STD testing for Pima and Yuma counties, and they did rabies testing. They would bring the animals in, and they would do the testing on-site — it was convenient for the county," Humble said. "They did testing on drinking water, too. Most counties in Western states rely on public health labs for core testing."
Humble said the decision to close the lab was part of an effort to reduce $32 million from the state's $600 million budget for the 2009 fiscal year.
The rent on the state-owned building that the Tucson lab used was $70,000 per year, and the state's Department of Administration is currently looking for another occupant, he said.
In another budget-slashing move, the Arizona State Public Health Laboratory in Phoenix will be suspending eight tests: serotyping of streptococcus pneumoniae; typing of adenoviruses; typing of enteroviruses; hepatitis B total core antibody testing; immune screens for measles, mumps, rubella; immune screens for varicella-zoster; gonorrhea cultures; and DNA test probes for gonorrhea and chlamydia.
Humble stressed that the lab would consider reviving one or more of the suspended tests on a case-by-case basis if there's an outbreak investigation, like the measles outbreak in Tucson last year.
