Covid19 Testing centre at Mbarara University of Science and Technology
The head of the laboratory at the Epicentre Mbarara Research Centre, where research is conducted on different infectious diseases in the region explains what happens there in the adjacent video.
As the lab at Epicentre, when we had this COVID-19 pandemic come up, we teamed up with Mbarara University and Mbarara Regional Referral Hopsital, who is the representative for the Ministry of Health in the western region, to find ways to give back to the community……..And this we did by supporting the testing for COVID-19.
Being one of the few labs that has the capacity to do PCR, the reference test for COVID-19, we thought it prudent that we offer support to the ministry, otherwise, it would have been difficult to find this service in the region. It was at a time when cases were rising quite a lot, ah…samples that were coming from the border points of this region were delayed on transit to Kampala, to Entebbe, and this came to the knowledge of the ministry of health that we had a facility that could do this test, and they requested us to support.
So, we started doing the testing right about 6 months into the time when the first case was identified in Uganda, and we’ve still been doing the testing for samples that come from the western region. And this covers as far as Kyanika in Kisoro, the border point in Isingiro, samples from as far as Kasese come here and the rest of the areas within.
This collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Mbarara University that has emphasized our presence in the region, now the larger part of the western region, and in fact, Uganda at large, knows that we exist in Mbarara on Mbarara University campus, and it’s put us out in the world, because we get people all over the world contacting us for their tests for travel, whenever they’re coming to Uganda, including, in fact, most of these are actually tourists. So we serve as a reference point for COVID-19 testing in Mbarara and the surrounding areas.
