Kadena Labratorians saluted during Lab Week

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KADENA AIR BASE, Japan --  More than 280,000 medical laboratory professionals across the world will be honored next week, among them are nine laboratory technologists and technicians from Kadena. 

National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, April 19-25, recognizes those that perform and interpret laboratory tests, which save lives and keep people healthy. 

To celebrate National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, laboratories across the country will host open houses, tours, lectures, and demonstrations to help acquaint the public and other health care professionals with the workings of the medical laboratory. The Kadena Clinic will hand out information to educate the community and offer light refreshments for the staff and patients all week long. 

"We are proud of the work we do," said Capt. Karen Chisholm, chief of the Clinical Laboratory Element. "We have to be painstakingly meticulous in performing our jobs to provide dependable answers to our physicians." 

Using state-of-the-art technology and instrumentation, laboratory professionals help to prevent disease by detecting unknown health problems and aids in the diagnosis and treatment of existing conditions by giving accurate, timely test results. 

Doctors rely heavily on lab tests to make diagnoses, thus laboratory professionals are critical components of the health care system. Results of laboratory tests often identify the presence of diseases in their earliest stages, when the possibilities of a cure are greatest and when treatment is least costly. 

Medical laboratory professionals represent a variety of specialties, including pathologists, medical technologists, clinical laboratory scientists, medical laboratory technicians, histotechnologists, histologic technicians, cytotechnologists, cytopathologists, phlebotomy technicians, clinical chemists, microbiologists, laboratory managers, and medical educators. 

These professionals can be found in hospitals, doctors' offices, clinics, research facilities, blood banks, public health centers, the armed forces, universities, industry, and in the deployed environment. Within the laboratory, these highly educated medical laboratory professionals may work in chemistry, serology, hematology, cytology, microbiology, immunology, coagulation, histology, urinalysis, molecular biology, or the blood bank.