PAKISTAN IS FIRST IN SOUTH ASIAN COUNTRY TO GET TESTING KITS FOR CORONAVIRUS

Islamabad : the Increasing of  coronavirus incidence all over the  country, the National Institute of Health (NIH) claims to have tracked most of the pilgrims, who returned from Iran shortly before the outbreak began there last month.

“About 7,500 Pakistani pilgrims returned from Iran during the fortnight that passed before their host country told a large number of confirmed cases and deaths in the third week of last month. Alert to the situation, we’re quick  into action and went after the returnees just to prevent the spread of the virus. Until now, we’ve located almost 6,500 of them along with their social contacts in-spite of  resource and infrastructure constraints and are tracking the rest for diagnosis by labs at the provincial level,” NIH executive director Major General Dr Aamer Ikram told ‘

“Pakistan is the first South Asian country to get hold of coronavirus testing kits, which were offered by China. While having an adequate stock of testing kits, the NIH has provided them to Karachi’s Aga Khan, Dow University and Civil hospitals, Lahore’s Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Institute of Public Health, Multan’s Nishtar Hospital, Peshawar’s Khyber Medical University, and Gilgit and Azad Jammu and Kashmir’s health departments besides training their relevant staff members,” said the NIH executive director.

In-addition to purchase more kits from different countries, the NIH also intends to develop them by themselves.

“PCR (polymerase chain reaction) is the best technique to diagnose coronavirus, an RNA virus, and primers are required for PCR testing. However, primers aren’t synthesised in Pakistan, so the country depends on others for it. Now realizing the significance of the situation, we need to buy a system from USA for the very early detection of the virus by developing primers and standardizing them. It’ll take us few weeks to begin doing so to meet own needs,” he said.

Major General Dr Aamer, a public health expert, said the RT-PCR technique converted that RNA into DNA and multiplied it by machine before carrying out different exercises to detect the virus and it’s a highly specialized testing technique, so not all pathological labs could perform the test.

He said as the making good and strong of the lab capacity in terms of quick diagnostic testing was always needed for any national reference lab, the new system would result in increase productivity of the lab.

“We believe that in-house capacity building in terms of diagnosis will help change the face of the pandemic,” he said

The NIH chief said the institute had shifted a state-of-the-art, costly mobile Bio-Safety Level-3 lab to the Pak-Iranian border to handle the deadly coronavirus.

“The lab will test the suspected cases quarantined on the Taftan border then and there as we can’t afford to import more cases,” he said.

Major General Dr Aamer said confirmed cases were discharged from hospitals only after they tested negative for coronavirus twice.

He said if any positive coronavirus case was reported as negative for one reason or the other, the consequences would be extremely unfortunate during the outbreak.

as far Pakistan has reported 447 confirmed cases of Coronavirus and 3 deaths. 5 patients have completely recovered from the affliction. They were released from quarantine after their test results came negative twice.