Kenya has set her eyes on manufacturing (Coronavirus Covid-19) vaccine, joining other countries around the world rushing to save the world from the pandemic.
The news comes at a time when Kenya has 296 confirmed cases, with 14 fatalities and 74 recoveries, with the Ministry of Health grappling with inadequate testing kits.
Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) on April 21 told the media that it had set out to establish the genome and sequence of the virus in Kenya, to compare it with that of other nations.
KEMRI Research and Development Director Sam Kariuki stated that the agency had completed the first process of developing testing kits and the genome sequencing of the virus.
“We will learn how it behaves in terms of what makes it more infectious, whether the one in Kenya is different from the rest in other parts of the world or if it has ‘cousins’.
“It is this information that will be used to develop the test kits,” the microbiologist stated.
The testing method used by KEMRI is an antibody-antigen test. The test involves monitoring how the body releases antibodies when infected by a virus. This is different from the World Health Organization’s approved test, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
Antibody-antigen tests take almost 24 hours to manufacture the results. Another test being used is the point-of-care tests that give results within 15 to 25 minutes, just like the HIV/AIDS test.
A PCR test was expensive for the government, as a triplicate test run costs the government almost Ksh 45,000.
Due to a shortage of swabs, on Sunday, April 19, Health CAS Mercy Mwangangi detailed that the ministry had hatched a new testing prioritization strategy as they shifted to frontline health workers and Coronavirus hot spots. This is even as random mass testing had begun in densely populated areas such as Kibra, Nairobi.
A swab is thin — less than three millimeters in diameter at its tip and is a small piece of soft material used to collect a sample.
“All healthcare workers and other first responders directly interact with many people,” Mwangangi clarified.
The government so far has been running its tests on traced contacts of the infected individuals, with MoH Director-General Patrick Amoth stating that Kenya had missed out on its projection due to low testing.
“I think we have had various modeling plans and the first one was that which we spoke about in April, but looking at the samples we had tested, because of the global supply challenges regarding testing kits, we have not reached the number we had anticipated.
“We hope as we go forward, we can reflect the figures we had projected,” Amoth stated, recalling that the ministry had estimated 10,000 Coronavirus cases by the end of April.
