The United Nations Secretary-General’s Mechanism (UNSGM) Dry-Laboratory External Quality Assurance Excercise [EQAE] 3, 2023 conducts dry-laboratory [Bioinformatics] external quality assurance exercises for the detection and characterization of viral pathogens as biological weapons with Next-Generation DNA Sequencing to further strengthen the bio-analytical reference laboratories in the UNSGM. Accordingly, Armauer Hansen Research Institute has participated in a Dry-Laboratory [Bioinformatics] External Quality Assurance Exercise (EQAE) for the first time.
In this year UNSGM Dry-Laboratory EQAE 3, a total of 186 Global Laboratories signed up with 111 laboratories from 59 countries participating/submitting results representing regions: Africa (10), Asia incl. China (21), Europe (50), North America (6), Oceania (10) and Latin-America (14). Among all 87.4% (97/111) of the participants reached a score of at last 75% of all points.
The result that AHRI scored [83%] is encouraging and aligned to UN target aiming to evaluate the capability of laboratories to identify and characterize viral pathogens which will help AHRI to be a potential laboratory to be included in the UNSGM roster and respond to future emerging pathogen surveillance.
We would like to say Congratulations to staffs members participated in this exercise!