The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), says it will collaborate with global partners to tackle bottlenecks affecting its target of testing for the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the country.
The Director General of NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria(NAN), on Tuesday in Abuja.
Ihekwazu said that the centre was working very hard to equip its network of laboratories to be able to achieve the target in the country.
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The DG said that the centre so far had 26 testing laboratories in its network for COVID-19.
NAN reports that the NCDC Laboratory Strategic Group has set itself a target of testing two million people across the country in the next three months.
The two million Nigerians will come to about 50,000 per state which the health agency noted was a very ambitious target.
The NCDC said that this would cost a lot of money and also require a lot of collaboration.
“We did put an ambitious target of hitting two million tests in three months, this is the beginning of week three if I’m not mistaken.
“So, we are not in the second month yet.
“Sometimes, to drive improvement, you have to set out that target for yourself, and that is really what we’ve done.
“There are many bottlenecks to this and that’s something throughout this week we are working with our global partners in terms of how to unbottle some of those supply chain challenges.
“And some of those things are now going to yield fruit this week.
“I actually don’t want to name a date until I have those reagents in the country.
“So, I’m hesitant to say this is when it will happen or that is when it will happen.
“There is now a lot of momentum around the supply, we hope those reagents will really lead us to that,” Ihekweazu explained.
The DG said that the other thing was how the NCDC would stimulate collection of samples from Nigerians.
Speaking on activation of laboratories in the country, he said that when building an institution, there were many things that were never visible to people.
“So, when we come to NCDC four years ago, we realised that there were several pieces of laboratory equipment lying across the country that were not functioning.
“Why were they not functioning, maybe for one small component or problem. And you’ll be wasting equipment worth millions of naira or millions of dollars.
“So, we started looking for how to train our biomedical engineers.
“We found partner in Japanese International Corporation Agency (JICA), and they started supporting us specifically in this regard.
“We now retained two bio medical engineers over six months in Japan.
“Japan is well known world-wide for their capacity around things like this.
“These two colleagues are leading a lot of the efforts on the equipment side of activating labs.
“Then we have our biomedical Laboratory scientists that are leading the training on Laboratory diagnostic science,” he explained.
Ihekweazu said that the agency would send a three-man team comprising a biomedical engineer, a molecular Laboratory scientist and one new colleague “expert” to be trained in the process .
“Two teams left today, one in Katsina and the other to Ilorin to do this.
“And as we continue to do this, we build the capacity of more Nigerians to do this,” he said.
Ihekweazu noted that the maintenance of medical equipment was one of the biggest challenges the health agency had. (NAN)
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