Reza Mahmud :
When World Health Organisation (WHO) and other public health experts urge the government to start massive test to net the virus infected people, then huge amenities for rapid test by GeneXpert machine remain untouched.
GeneXpert is a high-tech equipment to detect tuberculosis infected persons. Bangladesh has 270 GeneXpert machines in different cities, districts and upazilas level hospitals across the country.
Public health experts said most of those machines are still unused as the TB infections is very low in the country nowadays.
This equipment, however, can sharply detect Covid-19 patients. It can provide Covid-19 test report within 45 minutes only.
Sources said, the coronavirus infections are increasing day by day in the country. On Friday, 35 deaths and 2,548 people infected from coronavirus, Professor Dr Nasima Sultana, Additional Director General (Administration) of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), said in a press briefing in Dhaka. She said that 12,027 samples were tested across the country in the last 24 hours.
The total number of cases in the country is now 2,18,658.
Since July 25, the infection rate has been remaining around 22 percent for long.
In this situation, the public health experts are worried about the high rate of infections remaining almost unchanged.
To contain the spreading of the fatal virus, public health experts always stress on the government to arrange equipment and other logistic supports to conduct massive tests.
They advised to conduct test aggressively to net the contaminated people sharply and take all of them to isolations to restrain the spreading of the virus.
In these views, the National Advisory Committee of Covid-19 suggested the government to start using GeneXpert machine besides the RT-PCR testing tools to detect the coronavirus patients across the country.
They said there are only 80 RT-PCR machines across the country to detect coronavirus infections which is not adequate in this large and densely populated country.
As per the suggestion, government has initiated to start using of GeneXpert in this regards, but in very poor level, according to the officials.
“It’s true that we have 270 GeneXpert machines across the country, 40 among them are in Dhaka. But we have started using six of those machines only in Dhaka,” National TB Control Programme Director Professor Dr. Md Shamiul Islam told The New Nation on Friday.
He said that they have updated the software of those machines to enable the apparatus for detecting the coronavirus patients.
The officials blamed scarcity of kits in world markets which is the reasons behind the few GeneXpert machine on use.
We get only 10,000 kits from international donors and using those kits in these six testing centers including National Institute of Diseases of the Chest and Hospital (NIDCH) in the capital’s Mohakhali.
But experts do not agree with the scarcity of the kits of GeneXpert machine.
“So far we have information, there are no shortages of kits of GeneXpert machine to use for detecting Covid-19 patients,” Professor Dr. M. Muzaherul Huq told The New Nation on Friday.
He suggested the government to invite open tender to collect the kits by private sector importers.
“It is very important to detect all Covid-19 patients sharply and isolate those in quick response. There is no alternative to use GeneXpert machine for fast test,” he said.
It will be helpful to restrain spreading of the disease quickly, the expert added.
