Dr Prince Hamid Armah, Executive Secretary of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) has lauded scientists from the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) of the University of Ghana (UG), Legon for successfully identifying the gene responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr Hamid Armah, also a Lecturer at the University of Education, Winneba and a Parliamentary Hopeful for Kwesimintsim in the Western region, said the breakthrough is a major millstone to acquire treatment to save many lives being perished by the novel virus.

He said the tracing of the Covid-19 genome “is a major step in the search for a cure or vaccine and will guide the work of scientists all over the world.”

Dr Armah excited by the feat chalked by the country’s primer university, said this should encourage other institutions of higher learning to devote more researches into research a pillar to find solutions to the issues affecting the people and their development.

He so concerned Ghanaian universities devoting more attention to their “research function, a vital part of their mandate. This would not only extend the frontiers of scholarship but provide vital data to guide public policy drafting and decision making.”

As a research himself, reiterated the need for other tertiary institutions to join the race and challenge themselves in the search for solutions to Covid19 and other public health crisis facing the country.

To him, the discovery by the UG scientists is important because it provides useful information about the genetic composition of the viral strains, at least as far the Ghanaian cases are concerned.

The UG scientists made the breakthrough when they analysed samples of 15 confirmed cases to gain a comprehensive understanding of the variations of the virus present in the country.

Dr Armah congratulated the University of Ghana for the feat and also called on other institutions to go further, including investigating the efficacy of local herbal medicines in dealing with this virus and other illnesses that currently confound conventional treatments.

Background

The SARS-CoV-2 genome was rapidly sequenced by Chinese researchers. It is an RNA molecule of about 30,000 bases containing 15 genes, including the S gene which codes for a protein located on the surface of the viral envelope (for comparison, our genome is in the form of a double helix of DNA about 3 billion bases in size and contains about 30,000 genes).

Comparative genomic analyses have shown that SARS-CoV-2 belongs to the group of Betacoronaviruses and that it is very close to SARS-CoV, responsible for an epidemic of acute pneumonia which appeared in November 2002 in the Chinese province of Guangdong and then spread to 29 countries in 2003. A total of 8,098 cases were recorded, including 774 deaths. It is known that bats of the genus Rhinolophus (potentially several cave species) were the reservoir of this virus and that a small carnivore, the palm civet (Paguma larvata), may have served as an intermediate host between bats and the first human cases.

The University of Ghana discovery found that “while there were some differences between the strains from different countries all the 15 geromes [in Ghana] generally resembled (with 92% similarity) the reference strain that was isolated in the Wuhan province of China where the outbreak began.” 

By Bernice Bessey