PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government hasn’t granted permanent service status to contractual employees of the Public Health Reference Lab, Peshawar, even six months after Chief Minister Mahmood Khan promised them job regularisation.

Officials at the health department told Dawn that Chief Minister Mahmood Khan had announced during a function in July last year that his government would regularise the services of the contractual staff members of the PHRL, but no action had been taken on the announcement since then.

They said the PHRL was established at the public sector Khyber Medical University in 2015 with the health department declaring it a move to strengthen surveillance of 41 infectious diseases and take preventive action against their outbreaks.

Officials said in early 2020, the lab not only began Covid-19 testing but also helped the health department set up 12 PCR labs in districts to diagnose the virus within days of tests unlike Islamabad’s National Institute of Health, which took weeks to come up with reports on the samples sent by the province.

Health secretary insists regularisation process in progress

They said after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the PHRL recruited 65 staff members, including doctors, paramedics and medical technicians, to strengthen the virus diagnosis and take appropriate measures for the prevention and control of the virus.

Officials said that there was a greater likelihood of the health department abolishing the PHLR after the formal announcement of an end to Covid-19 pandemic and if that happened, it would adversely affect the health department’s strategy to diagnose cholera, dengue, typhoid and other diseases.

They said the government was required to regularise the lab’s contractual employees, who had already been trained in disease investigations.

The officials said the NIH had formally declared that all tests done by it could be carried out by the PHRL.

They said overall, 5.3 million PCR tests for Covid-19 were reported in the province and four million were conducted by the PHRL free of charge with Rs250 million spent on the latter though the private labs would have charged Rs8 billion for them.

The officials said the lab also received samples for tests of Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever and influenza, including cholera, measles, Congo fever and influenza, so it should be strengthened as part of efforts to prevent disease outbreaks.

They said the lab had helped disease prevention and control by early testing and prompt action, so it was important to test more and more people, especially in post-flood times to stem the spread of infections.

Officials said the PHRL was a public health lab and not a clinical one, so the government should support it financially.

They said the lab had the capacity to carry out monkeypox testing, while tests of salmonella typhoid culture sensitivity were conducted for suspected typhoid patients, who weren’t responding to certain antibiotics.

The officials said the lab had planned to start testing for hepatitis B and C and HIV/Aids in near future.

They said funds were required to procure reagents for genome sequencing of Covid-19 positive patients in view of threats posed by the surfacing of new variants.

Officials said the health department had so far sent 54 samples of suspected coronavirus cases from the Bacha Khan International Airport, Peshawar, to the lab but they all tested negative for the viral infection.

They said the positive Covid-19 cases reported either on the airport or Pak-Afghan border would require sequencing for which the PHRL required funds.

The officials said currently, the lab needed full genome sequencing of 190 positive samples and partial of 150 samples and that was possible only after the reagents were made available. They said sequencing of 100 samples cost Rs4 million.

The officials said partial genome sequencing was relatively easy, cheap and quick but offered limited information, while full sequencing took around a week to process and was expensive.

“The PHRL has already floated tenders but requires funds from the government. The lab exhausted its stock in November. The companies in Europe start manufacturing reagents only after receiving orders,” an official at the health secretariat told Dawn.

He said the centre had instructed all provinces to begin genome sequencing of all positive Covid-19 cases coming in from abroad as part of strict surveillance to cope with the new variants of the virus.

When contacted, provincial health secretary Amer Sultan Tareen insisted that the process to regularise PHRL employees was in progress.

“We acknowledge the significance of the lab and will regularise its contractual employees in line with the instructions of the chief minister,” he said.

Published in Dawn, january 8th, 2023