india

Updated: Mar 18, 2020 03:55 IST

Private medical facilities will be allowed to test if people have the new coronavirus (Sars-Cov-2), top health officials said on Tuesday, amid calls to expand efforts that have been criticised for being too limited to be able to catch if the disease has begun to spread silently in a country of over 1.3 billion people.

These tests, however, will be open only to those who fit into rigid guidelines set by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) — people showing symptoms, and those who either have a travel history to one of the global coronavirus disease (Covid-19) hot spots, or have been in contact with a person who has tested positive. No voluntary or walk-in tests will be allowed.

The ICMR announcement — it also expanded government labs, announced the procurement of an additional 1 million test kits from the World Health Organization (WHO), and included health care workers into the testing fold — came on a day when a third Indian succumbed to the pandemic and 23 more were confirmed to have been sickened. Officials confirmed 137 cases in the country. At least six more were presumptive positive cases, making Tuesday’s numbers the biggest single-day jump yet.

The body, India’s apex medical research centre, revealed that the first batch of second round of “random samples” collected from hospitals had all tested negative — a result they cited to say that the outbreak in India has not hit the critical stage of “community transmission”, a period when an infected person is unable to pinpoint he source of the disease. The results of 500 more samples are likely on Wednesday.

“The technical committee that takes a call on the testing criteria has met twice so far. The recent meeting was on Monday, and it was felt that the criteria to collect samples — symptomatic people with a travel history or symptomatic people having come into contact with a laboratory confirmed case — remains the same,” said Dr Balram Bhargava, director-general, ICMR.

Some experts, however, have questioned this approach, saying that they were not sure India had tested enough people to conclude that community transmission had not taken place. The ICMR stance is also at odds with the World Health Organization’s, which has urged countries to test as many people as possible to curb the pandemic.

“You can speculate one way or the other but do we have enough evidence to support there’s community transmission? No we don’t. In rest of the countries where aggressive testing began, community transmission was already established,” said Dr RR Gangakhedkar, chief, epidemiology, ICMR.

The random testing process takes samples from severe pneumonia patients in hospitals across the country, a typical disease surveillance strategy that experts say needs to be reviewed when it comes to Covid-19 since many patients could be asymptomatic or with mild symptoms, thus not in hospital, but still be fuelling the outbreak.

For every confirmed case, there are 5-10 more people in the community with undetected infections and mild symptoms, according to a new analysis of data from China published in the journal Science.

“There are chances these asymptomatic or mild cases are being missed and depending on the contagiousness, numbers and exposure, it can lead to many new infections,” said Dr Lalit Kant, the former head of epidemiology and communicable diseases, ICMR.

ICMR analysed 1,000 samples taken between March 1 and 15. While half of these were found negative, the results of the rest were expected on Wednesday, the officials said.

“Results of random samples from half the laboratories came in today and all of them are negative for Covid-19, suggesting no community transmission in the first lot. More samples will be collected on a weekly basis in days to come for the purpose of surveillance,” added Dr Gangakhedkar, saying the criteria of selecting 20 samples from each of the 51 labs was adequate in number given the current degree of spread.

Experts have criticised the strategy. “I am quite concerned by the lack of adequate testing. India has the resources; it is not like Africa. If you don’t test, how would people know they have the disease? If people don’t know, then how will secondary infection be prevented,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy.

One of the proposals has been to authorise private labs — a demand that ICMR officials indicated they were open to.

“ICMR is engaging with private sector labs to perform testing while ensuring appropriate safeguards. These labs will have to procure the testing material on their own, and the government will only provide the virus sequence. And ICMR appeals to them to perform tests at no cost. Many have said they are trying to procure the probes and asked for a week or so.

The approved labs are likely to be among the 51 facilities accredited by the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration of Laboratories (NABL).

In addition to these, the ICMR announced 49 more organisations such as the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, Department of Biotechnology, and Defence Research, Development Organisation would be equipped to test for coronavirus by end of this week.

To ensure mass testing in a short duration, India has also added two lab sites that will have the capacity to perform about 1,400 tests in a day. The labs are in Noida (Delhi-NCR region) and Bhubaneswar (Odisha).

At present, India has a testing capacity of about 6,500 per day up to 300,000 samples. The new labs will increase the rate of testing to about 12,000 a day by the end of the week.

India has also placed orders for one million testing probes from Germany and has placed a request with the WHO for another million probes, which will take the total capacity to over two million.

For Muslims, Haram means prohibited and Halal stands for permissible. For instance, pork, alcohol consumption are Haram and hence considered forbidden for a practising Muslim. Now, it has emerged that even preventive measure for Coronavirus menace is not free of religious segregation.

The search for non-alcohol-based hand sanitizers has led to the sale of some so-called Halal alternatives in Malaysia. Locals are selling ‘Halal hand sanitizers’. Since face masks and hand sanitizers are highly recommended as preventive measures against the spread of novel coronavirus, Muslims are looking for something that is permissible in Islam. However, let’s inspect what Islam says about the use of alcohol.

Facts vs Myth

In Islam, alcohol consumption is prohibited, not its use as medicine. So any hand sanitizer that provides protection against viruses and germs should be welcomed.

Prophet Mohammaed (PBUH) once said, “Cleanliness is half the faith (Emaan).” Hadith reference : Sahih Muslim.

Fundamentally, the alcohol-based hand sanitizer is a good deterrent against potent coronavirus, so it is definitely not Haram or prohibited. Essentially, alcohol destroys the protein envelope that surrounds coronavirus. Destruction of protein envelope effectively kills the virus. But there must be at least 60% of alcohol content in hand sanitizers. Hence, alcohol-based hand sanitizer is a necessity, not a luxury.

Also, these are industrial alcohol, not meant to be consumed as beverages, so its usage as medicine is totally permitted.

In our daily life, we, the Muslims, even consume alcohol as medicine in a fixed quantity required for treatment of ailments. For instance, almost all Homeopathy formulations have some amount of alcohol and same is the case in some other biochemic formulations.

Using the so-called Halal hand sanitizer can be detrimental to you and your family.

In a perilous time like this, please do not get swayed by myth, make good use of alcohol-based sanitizers to save yourself and humanity from devastation.

(The views expressed are personal)