Senior Technical Advisor to the Director General of NCDC on Laboratory Services, Mr Tony Ahumibe on Tuesday, said Nigeria Centre for Disease Control is working assiduously to develop opportunities for rapid diagnostics kits.
Ahumibe said it can be used for first line screening using rapid diagnostics, to be confirmed by Polymerase Chain Reaction machine.
He stated this in his remarks at the official commissioning of the N120M molecular laboratory by the Gombe State Government.
According to him, “We will work together with the states to ensure that all these diseases that are plaguing our people, we will test them in the state, act quickly to stop them.
“Internationally PCR is a good standard for testing covid-19 at the moment to confirm you have a case.
“Within the country our strategy is to develop opportunities for what is called rapid diagnostic kits. Those ones can be used for first line screening and those who test positive using diagnostic kits can be confirmed with PCR but ultimately the whole standard is to use the PCR to test. The strategy for NCDC and the country is to test people, detect whether they have covid-19 or not and isolate them. Once we are able to achieve this then we will have a zero case circulating in our country. We are developing ideas around the area of screening, very soon the Airports will be opened and when it does it will not be everyone that will have access to this technology like PCR, there will be opportunity for us to screen them, take the cases we find at the screening and take it to PCR for testing.”
On his part, the Gombe State Governor Inuwa Yahaya, while lauding the effort of NCDC urged them to do more.
He added that, “This administration will not rest until we have everything we need to manage the health system effectively from covid-19 to God forbid, to any other disease that can afflict us, we are prepared. We have getting up two others with the help of two agencies of government, the NCDC is only monitoring to ensure the result is credible.”
