During the 2024 pertussis surge (also known as whooping cough), something telling happened at ARUP Laboratories before most clinicians knew an outbreak was underway. The Utah-based national reference laboratory was seeing a spike in Bordetella pertussis test positivity rates — weeks, and then months, before public health alerts were issued and before clinicians began ordering tests at the volumes the situation warranted. By the time recognition caught up with reality, diagnoses had been delayed. Patients had gone unidentified. The window for early intervention had narrowed.
That experience, and others like it, is what drove ARUP to build something new. On May 13, 2026, the laboratory announced the public launch of its National Infectious Disease Test Positivity Trends Dashboard, described as the first tool developed by a U.S. reference laboratory to track laboratory test positivity trends across multiple pathogens simultaneously. The dashboard is freely accessible online and updated weekly, drawing on deidentified test results from ARUP’s national testing volume to surface trends that clinical laboratories, medical directors, and clinicians can use to detect unusual patterns, seasonal shifts, and emerging infectious disease activity sooner than traditional surveillance channels may allow.
Filling a Gap Between the Lab and the Clinician
ARUP Laboratories, founded in 1984, is a nonprofit enterprise of the University of Utah Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and one of the country’s largest reference laboratories, offering more than 3,000 tests and test combinations. Its scale gives it something that smaller or regional laboratories cannot easily replicate: enough testing volume across enough geography to identify statistically meaningful positivity trends for specific pathogens at the national level.
The dashboard translates that volume into actionable intelligence. Weekly maps and charts show test positivity rates by pathogen, with state-level geographic breakdowns and week-over-week change indicators. Pathogen-specific pages are accessible through an expandable navigation menu, and a “Key Information” box on each page highlights specific data points of note. At launch, the dashboard covers six pathogens: Anaplasma phagocytophilum, Babesia microti, Ehrlichia chaffeensis, Streptococcus pneumoniae, varicella-zoster virus (VZV), and Bordetella pertussis.
The B. pertussis page illustrates both the tool’s utility and the ongoing relevance of the underlying pathogen. Dashboard data show that pertussis surges in 2024 and 2025 produced more than 43,000 and 28,000 cases respectively, with 2026 activity thus far remaining below those prior two years. That kind of longitudinal context, displayed visually and updated regularly, is precisely what clinicians and laboratory directors need to calibrate their index of suspicion and testing thresholds as conditions evolve.
Designed Around Privacy and Clinical Decision Support
ARUP was deliberate about what the dashboard is and is not. The dashboard carries an explicit disclaimer that it is not intended for comprehensive national disease surveillance or epidemiologic reporting, positioning it instead as a complement to existing public health infrastructure rather than a replacement.
Ben Bradley, MD, PhD, ARUP medical director of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Infectious Disease Genomic Technologies, High Consequence Pathogen Response, Virology, and Molecular Infectious Diseases, framed the tool’s value in practical terms: as a national reference laboratory, ARUP sees enough testing volume to identify meaningful trends for certain pathogens, and the dashboard was designed to give clients, laboratories, and clinicians information they can use to make better decisions for their patients.
The gap that ARUP identified during the 2024 B. pertussis surge is not unique to that pathogen. Seasonal respiratory viruses, tick-borne illnesses, and emerging pathogens all move through the population before public health systems formally characterize them. A freely accessible, regularly updated, multipathogen positivity dashboard from a high-volume national laboratory represents a practical, low-barrier tool for closing that gap, at least partially, for the pathogens it covers.
Sources and further reading:
ARUP Laboratories Launches National Infectious Disease Test Positivity Trends Dashboard
National Infectious Disease Test Positivity Trends Dashboard