India orders 1 mn probes for testing from Germany
NEWDELHI: With delays in procuring diagnostic and drug raw material from China because of the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak in Wuhan last year, India has turned to Europe for the probes needed for testing for the deadly infection.
India ordered one million probes from Germany. For Reverse Transcript-polymerase Chain Reaction assays – which is the test for Covid-19 -- primers, probes and positive and negative controls are needed.
“Primers we are producing indigenously, and there’s unlimited supply of it. Positive control is in the form of virus sequence and probe we have to procure,” said Dr Balram Bhargava, director general, Indian Council of Medical Research.
In preparation for community transmission of Covid-19, the ICMR added nine more labs to its network to increase the testing capacity from 6,500 to 12,000 tests a day, by the end of the week. India has a capacity to test 300,000 samples, and it is in the process of procuring one million testing probes from Germany.
The government has also placed a request with the World Health Organization (WHO) for an additional one million probes. All government labs doing tests are given 250 testing kits per day, and the number can be increased, if need be.
Apart from the 72 ICMR labs, 49 government labs in government medical colleges, Council of Sci e nti f i c and I ndustrial
Research, Defence Research and Development, and Department of Biotechnology will also be authorised to test for Covid-19 samples.
Two lab sites that can do about 1,400 rapid tests in a day in Bhubaneswar (Odisha) and Noida (UP) will be functional by the end of this week.
“ICMR is engaging with private sector labs to test while ensuring appropriate safeguards. Also, these labs will have to procure the testing material on their own, and the government will only provide the virus sequence. ICMR appeals to them to perform tests at no cost...,” said Dr Bhargava.
ICMR will provide only positive control (virus structure) to the private labs, and they will to procure the rest of the testing material on their own,” said Lav
Aggarwal, joint secretary, ministry of health and family welfare.
“...The idea is to avoid indiscriminate testing but at the same time not miss people who need to be tested,” said Bhargava. Private labs will test only people referred by a qualified medical professional.
“They will have to follow ICMR’S standard operating procedure that includes notification of all positive cases to their local integrated disease surveillance programme units on a real-time basis.”
The ICMR reiterated there was no community transmission yet, and India was still at stage II of the Covid-19 outbreak. Some experts have said that inadequate testing means that there is no clear data to show that India is not at the community transmission level, where infection spreads between people who have neither been abroad nor been in contact with people who have tested positive.
“We hope that community transmission doesn’t happen but it can’t be predicted, so we have to stay prepared...,” said Bhargava.
Indian drug regulator also approved Roche’s test for evaluation in India. If the ICMR validates the test, it can be sold in India. “Roche Diagnostics India has been accorded the test licence for cobas SARS COV-2 diagnostic test by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation and allows us to import select quantities of the cobas SARS Cov-2 diagnostic test for product performance evaluation,” said Dr Shravan Subramanyam, Managing Director, Roche Diagnostics India Private Limited.