NMC notice to 3 private labs for flouting ICMR norms

NAGPUR: Jalaj Sharma, additional municipal commissioner, has issued notice to three private laboratories for violating the directives of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) regarding Covid. The three laboratories are: Dhruv Pathology Lab (Ramdaspeth), Suvishwas (Ramdaspeth) and Metro (Dhantoli).
Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) officials had found differences in their online registration data and failure to record the time of testing. Other than this, municipal commissioner Radhakrishnan B had received complaints about these laboratories delaying testing samples and taking a long time in issuing reports to patients.
Sharma had inspected all pathology laboratories testing Covid patients on September 9. He found that the three laboratories were not following ICMR norms. He informed Radhakrishnan B, who asked him to issue notices to them.
The three laboratories will have to submit their replies to the NMC on September 12 by 11am. They will have to submit copies of their licenses, reports of all positive and negative patients, printouts of data fed into ICMR portals, RT-PCR reports uploaded on ICMR portal, etc. The owners or their representatives will have to be present before Sharma for a hearing in the NMC.
Dr Shailendra Mundhada, director of Dhruv Pathology, said NMC had access to all the requested data. “We are sending them data on daily basis. They are worried because of the increased death rate,” he told TOI.