Mumbai Ready with its first genome lab

While inaugurating the city’s first whole-genome sequencing laboratory the chief minister Uddhav Thackeray was capping three months of attempts put in by a group of doctors who graduated from the 100-year-old Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)-run Nair Hospital.

 

The Chief Minister in the inauguration stated that this lab in Nair’s affiliate Kasturba Hospital in Chinchpokli would be very helpful in finding the mutations in Coronavirus which would result in a strong fight against Covid 19 in the state. The requirement for such lab became important when the second wave had hit the nation with the new variant, Delta which was found in Vidarbha only during the peak, if it would have been detected earlier that could have helped in checking its spread. 

 

“The patients for Covid 19 will be divided into four categories, the first category will have those in hospital for a long period, the second category for those who are living in areas where the caseload is high, the third category of those with deceased samples and the last category would people having foreign travel history,” stated Additional Commissioner Suresh Kakani 

 

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will have to be more careful about picking up the samples as testing each of those samples would cost around Rs 10,000. “The US company Illumina has donated two machines to us which cost of Rs 6.4 crore, which is of the latest technology in the world,” stated Dr. Jayanti Shastri, who heads the Nair Hospital Microbiology Department and is in charge of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) genome laboratory Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, who also flagged off Nair Hospital’s centenary celebrations, stated that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has built the lab without any burden on the government but through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).