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ICMR starts replacing defective RT-PCR kits
Kolkata: The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has started replacing consignments of apparently defective RT-PCR testing kits from state-run laboratories
Kolkata: The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has started replacing consignments of apparently defective RT-PCR testing kits from state-run laboratories that were providing inconclusive results, Shanta Dutta, director of the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) in Kolkata, said on Tuesday.
“ICMR has decided to replace the kits which, some states claimed, were yielding inconclusive results. These kits were supposed to be standardised by the medical colleges and kept in -80 degrees Celsius without which they would give inconclusive results,” Dutta said.
“It appears that the state-run medical colleges neither standardized the kits nor did they maintain the right temperature. But as the tests need to be go on, these will now be replaced by kits from the National Institute of Virology in Pune,” she added.
ICMR–NICED in Kolkata is a research institute under the Union health ministry and the regional Virus Research Diagnostic Lab (VRDL) for eastern India.
“In Kolkata we have already replaced around 2,000 kits at IPGMER. We have also received some requests from School of Tropical Medicine to get their kits replaced. They are being replaced by kits from NIV Pune, which are pre-standardised,” Dutta said.
IPGMER is short for the Institute of Post-Graduate Medical Education and Research.
In a series of tweets, the Mamata Banerjee government of West Bengal, which has been drawing flak for its slow pace of Covid-19 testing, recently accused ICMR-NICED of providing defective test kits.
“The apparently defective test kits supplied by ICMR-NICED, Kolkata, are resulting in a high number of repeat / confirmatory tests and causing delays and other attendant problems at a time when we are batting a pandemic,” the state health department tweeted on Sunday evening.
The state government also tweeted that there had been no problems earlier when the testing kits were being received directly from the National Institute of Virology, Pune. Recently, supplies to government labs in West Bengal have been routed through ICMR-NICED.
Until April 21, West Bengal tested 6,182 samples. The state has 274 active Covid-19 cases. Fifteen people have died so far in the state of the disease.
