Queensland Health is to receive three new virus testing machines to boost the State’s capability for dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.
Minister for Health, Steven Miles said the machines were known as Panthers and were just like their namesake —“fast and intelligent”.
“These new machines will be based at Toowoomba, the Sunshine Coast and Rockhampton Hospital laboratories, adding to the four Panthers bought earlier this year for the Gold Coast University Hospital, Cairns, Townsville and Central Laboratories,” Mr Miles said.
“This new equipment will mean tests will no longer need to be sent to Brisbane from those areas and will dramatically improve turnaround times for a range of important tests, including in the very near future, COVID-19.”
He said Queensland’s laboratory testing was among the best in the world, and the State was continuing to lead the way.
Mr Miles said the machines would not only support Queensland Health as it continued to respond to COVID-19 at present, but also for the upcoming influenza season.
“The current diagnostic test used to screen for cases of COVID-19 looks for indicators of the virus in samples of people’s sputum, and from specimens from the nose and throat,” the Minister said.
“Queensland Health uses the gold standard of viral testing, known as Polymerase Chain Reaction testing,” he said.
“This is a three-phase test, which involves the extraction, purification, amplification and detection of virus DNA,” he said.
