The Ministry of Public Health is seeking to expand the types of testing being done at the National Public Health Reference Laboratory and a medical team from China’s Civil Defence Commission (CDC) has indicated their willingness to help, Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Shamdeo Persaud recently disclosed.
Persaud, at a recent forum, explained that during a recent visit by the team to the laboratory, certain areas of interest were identified.
“The Chinese CDC medical team did pay a visit to our national public health laboratory and we have actually identified some areas where we can collaborate,” he said.
“We are in the formative stages of preparing that proposal for the National Public Health Reference Laboratory on areas to develop its capacity. We want to broaden testing with difficult diseases to diagnose and build some capacity around that,” the CMO noted.
He recalled that this is not the first time that the ministry and the Chinese CDC will be collaborating on expanding testing done at the laboratory.
The CMO explained that during the Zika outbreak a few years ago, two consultants from China were sent to offer assistance and worked on some of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing.
The ministry, Persaud said, has been working to improve the laboratory’s testing capacity over the past years but their attempts have been futile.
Recently, samples taken from Guyana Manganese Inc miners, who fell ill after working in tunnels at Matthews Ridge in Region One, had to be sent abroad for advanced testing as the national laboratory does not have the capacity to do so.
While samples tested here had shown two of the hospitalised workers had tested positive for leptospirosis, advanced tests done by the Caribbean Public Health Agency in Trinidad and the CDC-China ruled it out.
The tests from the two agencies found that several samples were positive for histoplasmosis, an infection caused by breathing in the spores of a fungus which is often found in bird and bat droppings.
