PESHAWAR: Faculty member and Director of Khyber Medical University (KMU) Peshawar Public Health Reference Laboratory (PHRL), Dr Yasar Mehmood Yousafzai has been nominated for the award of Tamgha-e-Imtiaz by President of Pakistan.
It is worth mentioning that Dr Yasar Yousafzai has been involved in diagnostic pathology for more than a decade. After completing his MBBS, he started his career as a pathologist at the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital, Lahore in 2006. In 2015, he completed his PhD from the University of Glasgow, UK. On his return from abroad, he joined the KMU-Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Peshawar. Dr Yasar helped establish the country’s first provincial public health laboratory in 2017. However, this laboratory has not been approved for testing on dangerous pathogens. In January 2020, Dr Yasar assembled a team of professionals from the university in a bid to cope with the coronavirus outbreak in KP. Due to lack of a suitable testing lab in the province, he took this challenge upon himself. He quickly gained insights into the testing methods, got his team trained in safety and ensured that the KP-PHRL laboratories were upgraded to biosafety level 3.
As global supply chains of personal protective equipment (PPEs) dried up, he used innovative local solutions to protect himself and the team in an effort to keep working. His laboratory reported the first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus, first case of community transfer, first death and the first recovery in the province. In one month, his laboratory was able to increase the testing capacity from 40 per day to 1000 per day and performed more than 24,000 tests in less than two months. Currently, his laboratory is one of the largest corona testing laboratories in the country whose performance is routinely cited by public and independent sources. Dr Yasar Yousafzai has shown commendable level of motivation, dedication to work and willingness to go above and beyond the line of duty. Doing testing on a novel virus, he put his own life at risk. He has shown courage to work in a high-risk environment as a first responder. Being an academician of a university, he could have chosen to stay at home. However, he opted to put his personal preferences aside and took responsibility to face the risks so that the pandemic could be contained in the province.
He has shown leadership, clarity of thought and foresight in his work on coronavirus testing in KP by upgrading his lab to international standards. Vice-Chancellor KMU Prof Dr Ziaul Haq congratulated Dr Yasar Yousafzai for being nominated for Tamgha-e-Imtiaz in recognition of his activism, courage and the special role as a first responder in the pandemic. He said the role of KMU was not only being recognised in teaching and research, but KMU was showing its potential to be on the front-line of KP’s health system.
