Jharkhand has opted for diagnostic machines used for testing drug-resistant tuberculosis, which have only recently been okayed for conducting tests for Covid-19, in a bid to quickly ramp up the state's testing capacity.
The machines received the approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for conducting novel coronavirus tests last month.
“At the moment we are testing over 700 samples on an average daily at the four designated testing centres in MGM (Jamshedpur), RIMS (Ranchi), PMCH (Dhanbad) and Itki Arogyashala (near Ranchi),” said a senior official in the state health department who is associated with the Covid-19 surveillance program.
“However, we expect a spike not only in terms of positive cases but also in the number of samples needing to be tested with large numbers of migrant workers returning from other states. Hence, we need to ramp up testing capacity — at least one in each district. As part of this effort we have placed orders for the ICMR-validated TrueNat machines from Bangalore-based Molbio Diagnostics. We expect the machines to be installed at all district hospitals and all the six medical colleges by next fortnight.”
The ICMR had on April 4 validated the use of TrueNat and recommended Molbio Diagnostics' TrueNat beta COV test on TrueLab Workstation for screenings and had also approved the US Food and Drug Administration-approved real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) systems like Roche Cobas-6800/800 and GeneXpert for emergency situations.
TrueNat is a small, battery-operated machine, health department sources said. It requires minimal training expertise to operate and can easily be used in a smaller setting. The machine scans samples collected from the throat and nasal swabs collected by trained technicians wearing personal protective equipment.
“TrueNat is also able to provide results under an hour and can run up to 32-48 samples of multiple diseases such as Covid-19, HIV, and TB. The TrueNat machine test would cost around Rs 1,000-1,500 to the state exchequer while the RT-PCR test costs nearly 10 times more,” a senior health official said.
The state has placed orders for installation of 30 machines (one each at 24 districts, and six medical colleges at Ranchi, Dhanbad, Jamshedpur, Dumka, Daltonganj and Hazaribagh) and for nearly 10,000 testing kits inclusive of all consumables.
“Each testing kit can at a time test four samples so we are expecting 40,000 samples to be tested from the testing kits initially,” the official said.
The state has also enhanced testing capacity at all its four testing centres with adoption of automation mode and increased number of runs of tests (from two to four). It has also brought three new RT-PCR machines and given one each to MGM, PMCH and Itki.State mission director National Health Mission (NHM) Shailesh Chaurasia confirmed the plans to ramp up testing.
“We would like to go for the ICMR-approved TruNat machine's test as it gives results quickly and is less expensive. We hope to start the testing soon after installation,” said Chaurasia.
