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The pandemic, he says, has clarified the urgency of deploying PCR technology more widely for all kinds of infectious diseases, especially to politicians, who are now allocating more money to the technology. After Ssengooba had worked tirelessly for years to try to make PCR testing more accessible for tuberculosis, his efforts finally seemed to be getting validated. Andrews in Scotland in the development of diagnostics tests. Ssengooba’s creative repurposing of Uganda’s limited testing resources was “tremendous,” says Wilber Sabiiti, an expert at the University of St.

By cobbling together testing infrastructure where it was most needed, he was preventing disease while keeping critical goods flowing into the country.

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But Ssengooba understood how to balance the needs of public health and the economy. Many countries, even wealthy ones, struggled to get COVID screenings off the ground in the early months of the pandemic. Within a week the equipment was set up at two other major border points.

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They still used PCR technology but could return results on the spot in around half an hour.īy May the first COVID testing systems were working at the crossing point in the Kenya-Uganda border town of Malaba, reducing the waiting time for truck drivers from days to around half an hour. Unlike the lab setup in Kampala, which requires multiple machines spread across different rooms and experienced technicians to prepare and process the samples, these so-called GeneXpert modules were automated and about the size of a printer. He relocated that equipment directly to the border entry points and engineered some basic infrastructure (electrical power benchtop safety spaces) to support their use. He realized he could repurpose some of those small PCR machines to test for the coronavirus by using a different sample-processing cartridge.

Ssengooba considered the 265 machines he had set up throughout Uganda over the years to test for tuberculosis. The government was desperate to alleviate the backlog. Making matters worse, authorities had closed the airport. A queue of trucks formed, stretching for kilometers, holding up the import of everything from home appliances to construction materials to replacement parts for cars. Truckers awaiting their test results were stalled at the border for days, in part because the sample analysis in Kampala would sometimes take up to 72 hours to return a result. As the pandemic intensified, they couldn’t keep up. A crew of about 50 workers collected the samples in pickup trucks and delivered them to the lab, then turned around to go back for the next batch, spending long, exhausting nights on the road. Ssengooba’s team had to shuttle the samples themselves. Using fluorescent probes that latch onto portions of the coronavirus genetic sequence, these massive machines could determine whether a sample was positive for the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2. The capital city was the nearest place with laboratory technology set up to run a process known as polymerase chain reaction-or PCR. Those samples-sometimes more than 1,000 a day-then needed to be shuttled 150 miles to Kampala.

Ssengooba and his team began facilitating the collection of nasal swabs taken from truckers at popular entry points, where imported goods are brought into the landlocked country. Could Ssengooba make it possible to test everyone who wanted to enter Uganda? His entire country was counting on him. It had quickly become apparent that most of the new cases were coming through the border crossings, so screening people there would be a priority. Not long after the first case was reported in Uganda on March 21, 2020, Ssengooba received a message from a commissioner under the Ministry of Health. But it was hard to make politicians aware of the technology’s power. Ssengooba saw this as a major success and wanted to deploy more machines. By increasing the number of early diagnoses-especially among vulnerable groups such as children and people living with HIV-deaths associated with tuberculosis dropped, too. Ssengooba, who is scientific director of the mycobacteriology research unit at the Makerere University College of Health Sciences in Kampala, helped to set up 265 of the devices in clinics around the country. These new machines used rapid molecular testing to yield results within a couple of hours, meaning patients who tested positive could immediately be referred for lifesaving treatment. The deadly lung disease infects around 90,000 people in the East African nation annually, but it can sometimes take months to diagnose using traditional methods such as culturing samples of coughed-up sputum. A decade ago Willy Ssengooba began crisscrossing Uganda, training health-care workers on how to use a new machine to detect tuberculosis.