USAID Provides Bird Flu Detection Equipment To Pakistan
Siddique Islam - All Headline News Foreign Correspondent
Islamabad, Pakistan (AHN) - The American aid agency, USAID, announced on Saturday that it was purchasing real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) equipment for Pakistan’s National Reference Lab. With the new equipment the lab would be able to test samples for bird flu within six hours. The current equipment takes 24 to 72 hours to test samples. By streamlining the process of identifying the disease, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock will be able to avoid unnecessary culling of birds as well as reduce the risk of the disease infecting humans, a local newspaper reported. Around 28 small-scale poultry farms in the country have been infected with the H5N1 strain, resulting in the culling of more than 120,000 birds, the Daily Times reported on Sunday. Ambassador Randall Tobias, the USAID administrator, praised the performance of the National Reference Lab and its 11 field labs. In his statement, the USAID administrator asserted “it is in large part because of your hard work and dedication to the safety of your communities that Pakistan has not experienced bird-to-human or human-to-human cases of Avian Influenza.”
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