An Open Letter To Minister of Health, Nigeria: Establishment of Molecular Labs in Each State of The Federation.
Dear sir,
I hope this letter meets you in good health at the heat of this Covid19 PANDEMIC. I wish to commend the Ministry of Health and NCDC for stabilizing this outbreak, nevertheless there is danger ahead of us due to our inability to engage in robust contact tracing of individuals that came into the country due to poor House address and House numbering system that we have as a country; we have no database to this regard. Not to mention our inability to provide testing test across the Federation.
I write to you as a stakeholder in this fight. The following are my shared opinion which I will employ you to pay attention to:
1. Please decentralise testing centres across each state of the Federation. Establish Molecular labs, and open a window for volunteers to be recruited and trained for this purpose and for the future.
2. We have positive blood samples from positive cases, please allow us to harvest antibodies of this virus so that we can also produce our testing kits, design our primers and further work on our candidate vaccines.
3. Engage researchers from our Universities to come up with research frameworks and modelling protocols to curtail this PANDEMIC.
I hope and believe that my little voice will add value to your protocol design and implementation.
Thanks in anticipation of your affirmative response. Warm regards.
Yours Sincerely,
Akyala Ishaku Ph.D (DAAD Research Scholar, Melinda Gate Foundation fellow, Erasmus Mundi Fellow,IUIS Fellows, TETFUND Research Fellow)
Cc : DG NCDC