Tuesday afternoon in the toxicology lab, technician Kevin Pustulka was flipping through an animal cruelty case sent from an Atlanta veterinary clinic.
The case is just one of the 600 to 1,000 the center receives every day from all over the country.
Pustulka, a veterinary lab technician at the MSU Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health, said he planned on cracking open-bone specimens to check the fat content and determine if the dog in question had been malnourished.
Animal cruelty prosecutors in Georgia are awaiting the results of this test, which will be sent out with the more than 4,000 pieces of outgoing mail the center ships each day.
This Saturday, members of the public will get a chance to step in the shoes of the center's diagnostic experts, and for the first time, peek inside the state-of-the-art laboratories at the expansive, 153,000-square-foot facility.
The center, located south of campus near the intersection of Forest and Beaumont roads, will offer a public program from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday in which participants will get to travel through the center's various labs while investigating three mock diagnostic cases.
The open house has been in the works since the building opened in September 2004, said Director Willie Reed.
"We wanted to make sure the facility was completely equipped," Reed said. "It's taken time to get that all in place."
The center, which used to be housed in several buildings on campus, brings together 10 different diagnostic areas, including pathology, toxicology and endocrinology labs. In the past year, the center has received more than 170,000 cases from all 50 states and a number of Canadian provinces.
"That usually translates into 1.2 or 1.4 million tests a year," Reed said.
The center performs all of the West Nile virus testing on animals for the state of Michigan, and assists the Department of Natural Resources and the Michigan Department of Agriculture with tuberculosis testing on cattle and deer.
It is the only veterinary diagnostic center in the state and is recognized nationwide for its expertise in endocrinology, toxicology and microbiology, Reed said.
The facility boasts several level three biosafety laboratories, where pathogens that could be hazardous to human health - such as the West Nile virus - can be handled safely. Access to the labs is strictly controlled, requiring an ID card for admittance. Air from the labs is filtered and drainage is sterilized.
"Because of this new facility, now we don't have to rely on federal labs as much as we used to," Reed said.
After moving into the new facility, the center gained admittance into several federally funded laboratory networks that work to prevent outbreaks of deadly diseases, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, and its Laboratory Response Network, or LRN. There are 147 labs in the network, and MSU's facility is one of the seven veterinary labs included in this group, said Kathy Harben, a spokeswoman for the CDC.
"For the past six or seven years there's been a strong mandate to bring veterinary diagnostic labs into the LRN," she said. "What we're seeing is animals are likely to be sentinels for human disease."
Through the partnership, the center has received equipment, funding and training in emergency response procedures.
The center also does preventative testing to monitor for potentially lethal outbreaks of diseases like avian bird flu and foot and mouth disease.
All of the faculty at the center are involved in research projects in addition to their diagnostic work, Reed said, and students from the College of Veterinary Medicine are rotated through the facility. The facility also houses 13 resident veterinarians studying to become certified pathologists and provides part-time jobs as lab assistants for a number of undergraduates, he said.
One of the most exciting aspects of the work is the diversity of cases the staff members encounter, Reed said.
"You never know what problem you're going to work on tomorrow, what interesting challenge you're going to face," he said.
