These surveys continue to serve as a glimpse of public health laboratory activities at a point just prior to a Consensus Conference. Generally, the surveys offer some benefit to Consensus Conference deliberations by providing data for emerging issues or identifying problems not previously thought to be an issue.

Response to the surveys continues to fall short of replies from all 54 states and territories. Each has its own reason for not responding, but it would be nice if someday the response was 100%. Figure 1 shows that responses were received from 42 states, one territory and one city. The fact that states with significant involvement in the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic did not respond greatly reduces the overall value of this survey, but the limited data must suffice.