Havana: The United States blockade against Cuba limits the acquisition of resources necessary for the construction of Molecular Biology laboratories where the coronavirus can be detected, the local press said today.
According to a report published by the Granma newspaper, these facilities must comply with a series of technological requirements that are very expensive due to the amount of imported elements.
Dr. Francisco Durán García, national director of Hygiene and Epidemiology of the Ministry of Public Health of Cuba (Minsap) explained that the elements used for the real-time processing of the Polymerase Chain Reaction Tests (PCR) are acquired in distant places, which increases their costs.
For his part, the head of Constructive Repairs and Maintenance of the Minsap, Mijaíl García, commented to the Cuban News Agency that the coercive measures of the White House represent the greatest difficulty to complete the necessary infrastructure.
Public Health authorities recently reported that the island will have 27 Molecular Biology Laboratories for the diagnosis of patients with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, distributed in all provinces.
Currently, the Caribbean nation has 25 of these centers that analyze more than 20 thousand PCRs every day.
According to specialists, when the stage of confrontation with the pandemic concludes, these units will be used in the microbiological diagnosis of a group of diseases that could be an emerging threat in the future.
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the blockade constitutes the greatest obstacle to national development and a violation of human rights.
“The accumulated damages in six decades amount to 144 thousand 413 million dollars, and between April 2019 and March 2020, the action caused losses of more than five billion dollars, a record figure for one year.”