Ahmedabad, july 13: The state Health Department has decided to upgrade the microbiology laboratory at the B J Medical College on the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital campus into a level-III bio-safety laboratory.
This comes following a decision by the Union Health Ministry and the National Institute of Communicable Disease (NICD) to upgrade 16 laboratories across the country, in view of the possible surge in the number of samples required to be tested for the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu.
All the states are likely to have a level-III laboratory, while the north-eastern region will have a single upgraded laboratory in Assam, according to sources.
According to state Health Secretary Ravi Saxena, such laboratories are required, as at present, samples have to be sent to either NICD in Delhi or the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune. Considering that H1N1 is such a virulent virus, it becomes all the more important to determine the chances of an epidemic at the earliest.
The Ahmedabad lab is expected to start testing for the virus in a month’s time. “The work to upgrade the laboratory has been initiated following a directive from the Union Health Department. It will be accredited under the National Voluntary Laboratories Accreditation Programme,” said Saxena, adding that with a rapid increase in the number of positive cases in Gujarat, “it’s bit of an emergency”.
The accreditation process for the level-III laboratory is different from that of the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration of Laboratories (NABL), as this accreditation is for standard practices. At present, all the government college laboratories in the state undergo the NABL accreditation process.
–Agencies