Kintampo Health Research Centre ready for COVID-19 testing

The Director of Kintampo Health Research Centre (KHRC) in the Bono East Region, Dr. Kwaku Poku Asante says his outfit is ready to augment the government's efforts aimed at making Coronavirus testing accessible to more people.

The KHRC is one of the government's health research centres in the country and has contributed in responding to health needs both locally and internationally and also provided health research meant to inform government’s policy on public health.

Since 1994, when it was established, KHRC has conducted several research works targeted mainly at women and children, with the recent one targeted at the general public with some emphasis on biomedical research on malarial, maternal, neo-natal and child health.

Speaking in an interview at Kintampo, Dr. Kwaku Poku Asante was emphatic that KHRC was ever ready to conduct coronavirus tests, if the authorities would give the Centre the requisite authorization to do so.

COVID-19 test kits needed

“In times like this we all put our hearts together and support whatever efforts that our government is putting in place, and testing for COVID virus is one of the key things in the control measures.”

“We currently have the infrastructure, we have the space, we the manpower, we have people that are knowledgeable with PhD degrees here who can support the testing in this area. What we need ….are the logistics to specifically test for COVID-19.”

“We will also require the training of the manpower that is here because it’s a new test and they would have to be trained”, he stated.

Discussions underway

Dr. Poku Asante said discussions were on-going between the Centre and the Ghana Health Service on the issue and expressed the hope that in about a week’s time, KHRC will be accredited to run COVID-19 tests for the general public.

For his part, a Deputy Chief Biomedical Scientist at the Centre, David Dosso said the “lab is in readiness for COVID 19 testing. A few things we will need to have in place. Currently, we have Level-2 biosafety cabinet but we need to do this work effectively is Level-3 biosafety cabinet…..We will also need polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines."