The Young Medical Laboratory Scientist Forum (YMLSF) has said that it is ready to deploy 30,000 of its members to diagnostic laboratories to help speed up the rate of sample processing, in order to improve Covid-19 testing capacity in Nigeria.

The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has said that it is working to increase testing capacity to 1,500 tests per day. That target is only a third of South Africa’s 5,000 tests per day. The NCDC has tested less than 6,000 people so far, which is poor, compared to over 60,000 tests in South Africa.

The National President and Secretary of YMLSF, Isioma Chiladi Jeff and Ediale Solomon respectively, in a jointly signed statement, said that the statistics from reports credited to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, of the country having only two experts who can manage molecular testing for Covid-19 were false.

The YMLSF executives insisted that Nigeria has a large number of adequately trained medical laboratory scientists, who are resource persons in molecular testing. The duo, in their statement, said, ‘With the plethora of challenges in containing Covid-19 in Nigeria, it should interest you to know that [the number of diagnostic personnel] is completely out of this bracket, as there are more adequately trained medical laboratory scientists who are resource persons in molecular testing, as evidenced in the compiled list of Nigerian experts sent to NCDC by Association of Medical Laboratory Scientists of Nigeria (AMLSN)’.

The YMLSF also made the assertion that medical laboratory experts are well prepared across the country, stating that ‘Laboratory Management as enshrined in our curriculum entails setting up any sort of medical or molecular laboratory, managing the laboratory and production of reliable and quality results for patient management, and this we shall uphold to the people of Nigeria’.

Source: Premium Times

Photo source: Governor Tom Wolf