News
Covid-19 Testing Update
Date: 10 Nov 2021
Author: Hill Laboratories
Hill Laboratories recently attained accreditation for testing for SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – in saliva samples and nasopharyngeal swab samples. The saliva accreditation covers both diagnostic and surveillance testing. After many months of analysing both sample types for a number of different customers, it was gratifying to at last have our technical capability formally recognised through the awarding of this ISO 15189 accreditation.
Our saliva testing services employ the ‘SalivaDirect’ methodology, which was developed by New Zealander Dr Anne Wyllie’s group and the Yale School of Public Health. The SalivaDirect method has been fully diagnostically validated, and has been employed by many laboratories around the globe, with several million saliva samples having now been tested across this group of laboratories. Dr Wyllie has been very generous with her time and extremely helpful in advising us on the optimal way to implement the method, and we are very grateful for her ongoing support.
A lot of hard work has been invested by some key people in the business to allow us to reach this important milestone. Most of these individuals continue to work hard, as we further refine and scale our services, and we look forward to communicating future developments in our COVID-19 testing services. We are now in the process of increasing our operational capacity in our Hamilton laboratory, and we have begun work to implement these services in our Christchurch laboratory also.
While our COVID-19 testing services have been focussed into the Aged Care sector to date, we are now ready to scale our services into other industries. For the time being we will remain focussed on the ‘B2B’ market, so please get in touch with us if you are considering how saliva testing could be included in your business continuity planning.