Praava Health Receives Donation from One Million Masks

Praava Health has recently received a donation from One Million Masks - a charitable organization based in New York City in the United States - to support its work in the global fight against Covid. The donation is being made to offset the cost of sequencing Covid samples - a project that Praava is currently working with the research foundation Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF) to identify which variants are captured in the samples being processed at Praava Health. Data from Praava Health’s samples are contributing to GISAID, a global, open-access repository of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences. The amount of the donation is not being made public. 

One Million Masks is a grassroots initiative started by NewsCred CoFounder & CEO and CEO at Welcome Software Shafqat Islam. The team at One Million Masks is working with a goal to get one million masks to healthcare workers on the front lines in New York and beyond. 

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, Praava has processed more than 150,000 Covid tests, approximately 3% of the total tests done in Bangladesh to date. We are so grateful to One Million Masks for their generous contribution to help us to accelerate our work in sequencing some of our COVID samples to contribute to the local and global understanding of the Covid-19 virus,” said Sylvana Q. Sinha, Praava Health’s Founder, Chair, & CEO. 

"1 Million masks initially started as an initiative to help New Yorkers in need. But we quickly realized that there are people all over the world who we could help. And given our team and roots in Bangladesh, we're thrilled to be able to partner with Praava Health. They're doing incredible work on the ground, and we felt it was the fastest way to make an impact in Bangladesh," said Shafqat Islam, CoFounder & CEO of NewsCred 

Praava Health is concerned about the emergence of new variants and their impact on Covid testing and the spread of the disease in Bangladesh and beyond. To date, Bangladesh has contributed fewer than 5,000 samples to global sequencing data - a level of sequencing that is exceptionally low for a population the size of Bangladesh’s. Of the 172 countries that have uploaded sequencing data for 1.2 million cases, many report less than 1% of their cases; but Bangladesh’s sequencing is much lower with only .005% of all cases being submitted to GISAID, the global repository for Covid-19 genome sequencing. 

“To expand and contribute to our collective knowledge on the circulating variants in Bangladesh, we have been collaborating with CHRF to determine which variants are captured and to determine the fidelity of Covid testing in the light of the emerging variations in viral genome and the effect on population health,” said Dr. Zaheed Husain, Praava Health’s Senior Laboratory Director. “This donation will help us to further continue our work on this very important project.”  

Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF)'s mission is to, “prevent infections and save lives”, by working to understand what causes diseases, and advocating to institute evidence-based policies. The organization is led by Executive Director Dr. Samir K. Saha, an eminent Bangladeshi microbiologist and public health expert who also serves as the professor, senior consultant, and head of the department of Diagnostic Division of Microbiology at the Dhaka Shishu Hospital.