After few states complained that the rapid testing kits for coronavirus delivered inaccurate results, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Tuesday advised the states not to use the kits for two days.
"A lot of variations... kits will be tested and validated by on-ground teams and we will give advisory in the next two days," said R Gangakhedkar of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
"We will send teams of our eight institutes in the field... they will validate the kits in the field and if it is found that there is some problem in the batches of kits received we will send that batch to the manufacturing compony for replacement," ICMR Chief Scientist Dr Raman Gangakhedkar said.
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Earlier, the Rajasthan government stopped using rapid testing kits for coronavirus after they delivered inaccurate results and informed the ICMR about the issue.
The state's health minister Raghu Sharma said the kits gave only 5.4 per cent accurate results against the expectation of 90 per cent accuracy and therefore the kits were of no benefit.
A committee comprising heads of medicine and microbiology departments at the Sawai Man Singh government hospital here was set up by the government to examine the accuracy of the kits and the committee found that only 5.4 per cent test results were accurate.
"As per the advice of the committee, we have stopped testing from the rapid testing kits. We have written to the ICMR about it and their response is awaited," the minister said.
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The National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) has withdrawn the consignment of defective COVID-19 testing kits from some of the state-run laboratories in West Bengal, a senior official of the medical body said on Tuesday.
The faulty kits were replaced by those provided by the Pune-based National Institute of Virology (NIV), she said.
The West Bengal government alleged that the COVID-19 testing kits supplied by the NICED, the Indian Council of Medical Research's (ICMR) nodal agency in the state, a fortnight ago were "apparently defective" as they showed inconclusive results leading to repeated confirmatory tests and delay in diagnosis.
(With agency inputs)
