MICROBIAL TECHNOLOGY
Fig 1. Location of KSN Hospital, West Bengal, India. Fig 2. Right, top: KSN Hospital. Fig 3. Right, below: Equipment and resources at KSN Hospital.
out when he returned the following year. Ivor was passionately convinced that the hospital would benefit from a Microbiology Service, so he returned in 2018, when a proposal was made to key hospital staff, who were refurbishing two rooms for microbiology, and he planned a three-month trip in 2019 to install equipment and source consumables. However, Ivor‘s three-month trip in 2019 took an unexpected turn when he returned to find many challenges including that the hospital had occupied one of the allocated rooms for biochemistry, leaving a small room with no windows for microbiology! There were several failed attempts of sourcing a functioning autoclave and difficulties in deliveries of pre-poured culture media plates. Despite these obstacles, Ivor’s trip was more of a ‘fact finding’ visit, and after reading a Mast Matters (2017) publication, where Shirley Westwood, a biomedical scientist from
James Cook University Hospital, spoke about her extensive work in the Eastern African nation of Malawi where she described her journey and the complications she faced, one particular quote rang true: “I decided that if I was ever to return, I would need to take my own supplies”. So that is what Ivor set out to do, and the 2020 preparations commenced when he attended the IBMS Congress to reach out to diagnostic companies for support in supplies including Mast Group, BioConnections, Medical Wire, ProLab Diagnostics and Don Whitley Scientific. He enlisted help from ex-colleagues and set about preparing method protocols and a training programme.
In 2020, Ivor was as equipped as could be with equipment, resources (Fig 3) and his cavalry in tow, the training took place, with still some improvisations to be had including a candle in a biscuit tin as a makeshift CO2
incubator. A method
that many biomedical scientists in UK laboratories will remember, and has the great advantage of arguably being more reliable than using CO2
cylinders.
Nasal swabs were taken from infants to be used as control organisms for antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). They successfully isolated their first positive culture from a urine sample, and set up a simple manual blood culture system. The donation of a microscope with a digital camera (Fig 4) meant that support from Ivor and colleagues could be offered remotely by WhatsApp. Ivor recalled a key diagnosis of a burns patient, a 60-year-old female who had slipped and fallen into boiling water, initially taken to Government Hospital, Bankura, then presented at KSN 10 days later with large ulcers on lower back, buttocks and legs covering 40% of total body surface. She was treated
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