WVII Interviews Rebar About Importance of Building Biosecure Lab
WVII (Channel 7) spoke with John Rebar, executive director of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, about Question 2 on the November ballot that will ask Maine voters to approve an $8 million bond for animal and plant diagnostic services. UMaine Extension’s current facility was built in the 1940s and is not biosecure, according to the report. “Right now if you remove a tick from yourself, loved one, or a pet, we can identify the tick,” Rebar said. “There’s 14 different species in Maine of ticks, but we can’t tell you whether that tick contains microorganisms that will cause disease because we don’t have a biosecure lab in order to do that testing in.”