2025 in Review: Our Top Stories of the Year

It’s been an undeniably difficult year for public health.

But despite it all, public health laboratories have continued to protect both domestic and global health by skillfully detecting disease and quickly responding to outbreaks, be it measles in Texas or Ebola in Uganda. What’s more, they’ve managed to do it at a time when there are severe funding cuts and critical shortages in the laboratory workforce.

As the year closes, we look back through our Lab Matters articles, podcasts and APHL Blog posts to bring you 12 of 2025’s most impactful public health laboratory stories. These are stories that grabbed our attention then—and now—and prove that, regardless of the challenges, there’s been a lot of outstanding public health laboratory work to celebrate in 2025.

• Tuberculosis Cases Are Rising in the US. How Public Health Laboratories Are Stopping the Spread
•  New Hampshire Reported the Country’s Third Clade I Mpox Case: How the State’s Public Health Laboratory System Sprung Into Action 
• How Three Public Health Laboratories Partnered to Detect One Rare Virus 
• What You Need to Know About Oropouche—and What Laboratories Are Doing to Track Cases 
• MSU Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory Reaps the Benefits of the Career Pathways Program 
• Retention Drives Innovation: Making the Case for Public Health Laboratory Workforce Support  
• Making the Case for Public Health Laboratory Informatics Team Rightsizing  
• Fentanyl is Being Laced With a New Deadly Substance. How One State Laboratory is Responding 
• When the World’s Global Health System Is Strong, so Is America 
• A Multistate Outbreak of Infant Botulism Has Been Linked to Baby Formula: What We Know So Far—and How Laboratories Are Responding 
• Oregon’s One Health approach to Yersinia enterocolitica case 
• APHL Convenes Newborn Whole Genome Sequencing Initiative, Ensuring Public Health Laboratory Input