Bengal tags faulty testing kits as reason behind slow check up

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Bengal tags faulty testing kits as reason behind slow check up
Bengal tags faulty testing kits as reason behind slow check up

Kolkata : The West Bengal government has claimed that the faulty testing kits provided by the ICMR have been giving inconclusive results and delaying the pace of testing.

In tweets on Sunday, the state's Department of Health and Family Welfare has urged the ICMR to investigate the issue immediately as the delays have resulted in the need for repeat and confirmatory tests that are slowing down the battle against the pandemic.

Till date 310 people have been reported positive for the coronavirus in West Bengal and 12 people have died of infection.

While an ICMR response is awaited, the director of the Council's nodal body in Kolkata said that the matter was being seriously addressed.

"It is unfortunate that the kits are not standardised to give exact results. It is difficult for each of the medical colleges to standardise the kits, hence, they are showing different and inconclusive results," said Dr Shanta Dutta, Director of the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) in Kolkata.

"There was no problem earlier when the testing kits were being received directly from the National Institute of Virology, Pune. Recently, the supplies to government labs in West Bengal have been routed through ICMR-NICED, Kolkata," the department tweeted on Sunday.


"The apparently defective test kits supplied by ICMR-NICED are resulting in a high number of repeat/confirmatory tests and causing delays and other attendant problems at a time when we are battling a pandemic," it said.


The tweets have raised eyebrows because of a reference to "mischievous reports in social media about the alleged delay in the time taken for testing swab samples" in the state.