Health Ministry receives new COVID-19 breath testing system

Thứ Hai, 07/06/2021, 17:25

PSNews - The Ministry of Health on June 4 received a COVID-19 breath testing system costing over 460 billion VND (20 million USD) donated by domestic conglomerate Vingroup.

According to Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long, the system comprises 30 testing machines and disposable mouthpieces capable of collecting 2 million samples.

The BreFence™ Go COVID-19 breath testing system quickly produces results in an accurate and non-invasive manner. The test has received provisional authorisation from Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority (HSA).

It operates by detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in a person’s exhaled breath that are produced by biochemical reactions in human cells.

A person need only blow into a disposable one-way valve mouthpiece connected to a high-precision breath sampler. The exhaled breath is collected and fed into a cutting-edge mass spectrometer for measurement.

A proprietary software algorithm analyses the VOCs biomarkers and generates results in less than a minute, with an accuracy rate of 90 percent.

At the handover ceremony, Long highly appreciated Vingroup’s assistance to the health sector’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year as well as in public health care in general.

Vingroup has to date contributed close to 2.29 trillion VND (some 99.45 million USD) to the country’s COVID-19 fight. Of particular note, it presented 4 million doses of vaccine costing nearly 500 billion VND to the MoH, and provided 20 billion VND for clinical trials of the homegrown candidate vaccine COVIVAC, which is being developed by the ministry’s Institute of Vaccines and Medical Biologicals (IVAC).

By TM