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KU soon to have Covid-19 testing capacity

By Our Staff Reporter 2020-04-12
KARACHI: The University of Karachi will soon have a laboratory ready to diagnose Covid-19.

This information was shared at a meeting chaired by Prof M. Iqbal Choudhary, director of the KU International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences, on the campus on Saturday.

The biosafety lab III is being constructed at the National Institute ofVirology, part of Dr Panjwani Centre for Molecular Medicine and Drug Research.

The meeting participants were informed that this became possible with the support of the Sindh government which had approved Rs58.28 million for the laboratory, now in the final stages of construction.

Prof Choudhary, however, clarified that coronavirus tests would be available only after the facility received supplies of diagnostic kits from the provincial government.`The World Health Organisation has declared the timely diagnosis of disease a critical step to prevent the spread of Covid-19, as undetected infected individuals are the biggest source of virus transmission,` he said, adding that the laboratory was being built as per international standards.

He also spoke of the recently established virology laboratory, which had made it possible to conduct experiments involving live viruses, anti-viral screening activities of several compounds and tesdng vaccine candidates for theirimmune reactivity.

It may be recalled that diagnostic tests for coronavirus are currently being offered free of cost at the Indus Hospital, the Ojha campus of the Dow University of Health Sciences and the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation in the public sector.

The Sindh government has recently sought help from the federal government to help procure testing kits from abroad as the province `is lef t with only 6,000 testing kits, which are likely to last for 12 days`.