30 Oct 2023

Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership (BHP), as a regional genomic centre of excellence, will soon start receiving specimen from other African countries for testing at Botswana Havard HIV Reference Laboratory.

This was revealed by BHP laboratory manager, Ms Julia Ngidi when briefing Botswana development partners who recently visited BHP to appreciate its operations.

Ms Ngidi told the visitors that BHP was set up in the 90s when HIV was devastating Botswana.

“At that time, we had funerals on daily basis in each village. That made the then president, Dr Festus Mogae to seek and engage partners to help save the nation of Botswana,” she said.

She also apprised visitors on the grants awarded to BHP that were directed to key projects such as PEPFAR, the PMTCT and the Botswana Combination Prevention Projects, which had contributed to the attainment of UNAIDS 95-95-95 goal to be at 95-98-98.

Another laboratory operations manager, Dr Terence Mohammed highlighted that BHP supported training at different universities as the organisation had capacity building and training programmes, which supported universities to strengthen their training programmes.

Dr Mohammed also said BHP was looking into how it could strengthen the capacities it had generated in order to be able to deal with other public health challenges.

The visiting development partners hailed the laboratory on the findings of the Omicron pathogenomics, which they said had contributed in saving the lives of many worldwide through its impactful research that had since informed global health policies.

The visitors also toured the early infant treatment clinic, the Botswana Harvard HIV reference laboratory where the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant was first discovered. Ends