China to Expand Neonatal Screening

PerkinElmer Wallac Inc. (Turku, Finland) has signed a five-year agreement with the Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China (Bejing), to help expand neonatal screening for genetic diseases in seven of China's least economically developed provinces.

The program, which begins this year, is part of the Chinese Ministry of Health's Sino-Finnish neonatal screening cooperation program.

Under the terms of the five-year agreement, the Chinese Ministry of Health will purchase assay kits that will be used on the Victor multilabel plate readers donated by PerkinElmer for genetic testing. As a result, labs will have a powerful system for the detection and direct quantification of DNA and proteins. This is the second neonatal screening program between the Chinese Ministry of Health and PerkinElmer, a provider of neonatal screening technology. In the first program, initiated in 1996, PerkinElmer donated five neonatal screening systems and ran a neonatal educational program in China.

From now until the end of 2006, the implementation plans will be mapped out. During the years 2007-2009, training courses and information seminars will take place, and in the year 2010 a final assessment of the cooperation will be made.

Sources from the Ministry of Health said that neonatal disease screening began in the early 1980s in China. After implementation of laws and regulations to improve the health quality of newborn babies, hospitals started to screen babies for hypothyroidism (CH) and phenylketonuria (PKU). However, neonatal screening is still unsatisfactory in some urban and less-developed areas.

In 2005, PerkinElmer systems were used to screen more than 50% of the four million babies who received newborn screenings in China. This expanded initiative will enable China's Ministry of Health to increase the screening rate by at least 30% annually in each of the seven provinces involved: Hubei, Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Guangxi, Shanxi, Qinghai, and Guizhou. In addition to screening, the enhanced program will provide health education to physicians and lab staff at local screening centers, thereby improving the knowledge of genetic diseases and developing technical skills.

"As part of our ongoing commitment to newborn screening and maternal health worldwide, we are pleased to be supporting China's Ministry of Health once again with this neonatal screening effort,” said Robert F. Friel, president, PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences. "We are particularly excited that this partnership will reach families in seven of China's most underserved provinces, helping to reduce neonatal morbidity and mortality.”



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