Public health lab better prepared for future outbreaks

Barbados is much better placed to respond to future pandemics with the upgrade and expansion of the testing facilities at the Best dos Santos Public Health Laboratory.

According to director of the facility Dr Songee Beckles, the lab is prepared for outbreaks when they occur, especially with new testing machinery that enhances the ability to detect and identify organisms much more quickly. Two new pieces of equipment were recently acquired, and one of these allows the lab to identify bugs within 60 minutes, she told the House as the Estimates debate continued on Friday.

Dr Beckles said expanding the capacity to test as new threats emerge around the world has been a top priority and the lab has worked along with the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) which facilitates training and provides startup reagents to allow for testing of new pathogens in circulation, even before the diseases reach Barbados.

With officials from the health ministry sitting in the Well of Parliament, St Michael South MP Kirk Humphrey questioned how that ministry was preparing for another pandemic.

“What is our state of readiness? The pandemic became a health issue primarily, but it had serious social consequences…including post-COVID trauma,” Humphrey said.

Chief Medical Officer Dr Kenneth George highlighted that in the global village in which we live, movement of people means that diseases will also travel. He said any future pandemic is likely to be respiratory in nature and stressed that in preparation for that, the capacity of the Best dos Santos Laboratory had been strengthened.

“We were recently certified as a recognised centre for influenza within the Caribbean and that signals our ability to do more testing with respect to new and emerging threats. We continue to work with PAHO because we need to have an alert system which gives us information quickly,” he explained.

He said one of the things learned from the COVID-19 pandemic was that contact tracing is only useful in the early stages and closure of borders does not work.

“We also learnt that we need to be able to rapidly respond to the threat at hand. We certainly are more prepared at this point. Pandemics are difficult; we learn as we go, but based on how Barbados was able to respond, certainly we are better prepared in terms of our laboratory, surveillance capacity and in terms of scaling up our human resource capacity in response to the threat on the ground,” the CMO said.

Director of Clinical and Diagnostic Services at QEH Dr Corey Forde also reported that monthly training at the QEH is continuing as officials continue to get personnel ready to deal with another similar infectious disease situation.

He added: “We are looking to see how we can get some equipment which allows us to cut our identification time down from five to ten days down to one to two hours. This would allow us to be able to quickly identify our organisms to allow us to perform tasks and isolate accordingly.”

The House also heard that the health ministry is also looking at antimicrobial resistance which potentially increases the country’s vulnerability to diseases, with a view of providing clinicians with the information which guide treatment options. (SP)