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Rajesh Bhushan, Union Health Secretary, reviewed the status of passengers coming from the U.K. to India and found positive in the States/UTs of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Goa, Punjab, Gujarat and Kerala, and the States’ response measures, in a meeting held through video conference on Wednesday.
The States were advised to co-ordinate with the respective Airport Health Offices (APHO) and surveillance officials in their State in order to ensure adherence to the SOPs for Epidemiological Surveillance and Response in the context of new variant of SARS-CoV-2 virus detected in United Kingdom.
States/UTs were also advised to access the details of passengers from U.K. to India from the online portal AIR-SUVIDHA and the Bureau of Immigration, and send the samples of those found positive to the laboratories identified for genome sequencing.
The list of six identified labs along with the contact details of their nodal officers was also shared with the states.
The labs identified for genome sequencing are CSIR – Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi; CSIR- Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad; DBT- Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar; DBT – InStem – NCBS, Bangalore; DBT – National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG), Kalyani, West Bengal; ICMR – National Institute of Virology, Pune.
The Ministry in its release noted that the number of such designated labs would increase over time and their details would be shared with the States/UTs.
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