Minister of Health & Family Welfare (H&FW) S. Pangnyu Phom on Sunday said that the state government has plans to also setup a COVID-19 testing laboratory in Dimapur in addition to the proposed bio safety laboratory at Naga Hospital Authority Kohima.
In a telephonic interview to Nagaland Post, Pangnyu said the state government considered Dimapur as a primary concern because of its size and dense population and also being the gateway to Nagaland and for which extra focus was being made to fight COVID-19 pandemic. Pangnyu reiterated that the state has been putting all efforts to ensure that the state should at least have a testing laboratory for COVID-19.
He said any failure to check and contain COVID-19 in Dimapur could spur its spread to other parts of the state.
While admitting that there was much more to be done, Pangnyu was optimistic that the doctors were giving their best to fight the deadly pandemic.
Pangnyu has also appealed to all health professionals, particularly retired doctors, to volunteer and help those in the frontline combating COVID-19 across the state.
Meanwhile, with ‘Nil’ report of COVID-19 in the state, the authorities are mulling to step up efforts through proactive measures that could include an outreach to conduct a greater degree of screening.
Of all North Eastern states, only Nagaland, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Tripura have recorded ‘Nil’ report on COVID-19 cases. The news of setting up of a Bio Safe Laboratory in the state (one each at Kohima and Dimapur) will enhance not only the current efforts to contain spread of COVID-19 but would also prove a boon against other viral pandemic diseases such as Ebola, Chikungunya, Dengue, Nipah, Zika, MERS-CoV, SARS, Hantavirus etc.
While setting up Bio Safety labs, protection for laboratory personnel, the environment and the local community must be considered and ensured. The protections required by these types of activities are defined as bio safety levels. Biological safety levels are ranked from one to four and are selected based on the agents or organisms on which the research or work is being conducted. Each level up builds on the previous level, adding constraints and barriers.
The four levels include: Biosafety level 1 (BSL-1) is suitable for work with well-characterized agents which do not cause disease in healthy humans. Biosafety level-2 is almost similar to Biosafety level 1 except with additional precautions such as specific training for lab personnel handling pathogenic agents and under supervision of scientists with advance training.
Access is limited when work is being conducted and extreme precautions taken with contaminated items. Biosafety level 3(BSL-3): is appropriate for work involving microbes which can cause serious and potentially lethal disease via the inhalation route. Here, the precautions undertaken in BSL-1 and BSL-2 labs are followed including additional measures such as lab assistant are provided with solid-front protective clothing and cannot be worn outside but discarded and destroyed after use.
Also the lab assistants are provided medical surveillance and relevant immunisation to reduce risk from unnoticed infection. Biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) is the highest level of biosafety precautions, and is appropriate for work with agents that could easily be aerosol-transmitted within the laboratory and cause severe to fatal disease in humans for which there are no available vaccines or treatments such as presently, the Covid-19 (Coronavirus). In a protective-suit laboratory, all work must be done in a class II biosafety cabinet by personnel wearing a positive pressure suit.
In order to exit the BSL-4 laboratory, personnel must pass through a chemical shower for decontamination, then a room for removing the positive-pressure suit, followed by a personal shower. Entry into the BSL-4 laboratory is restricted to trained and authorized individuals, and all persons entering and exiting the laboratory must be recorded.