The two-year research project will be funded by the Sarawak Research and Development Council (SRDC) with a grant of RM500,000.

Sarawak Education, Science and Technological Research Minister Michael Manyin said currently hospital doctors were dependent on the Institute for Medical Research (IMR) in Kuala Lumpur for laboratory confirmation of human rabies, which involved expensive and time-consuming transportation.

The absence of laboratory testing facilities in Sarawak is a major limitation in the clinical care of suspected human rabies cases in the state.

“We cannot use courier service to transport the samples and have to hand carry them, so it takes a lot of time and money before we can obtain the results.

“We hope that with the availability of this rapid rabies test kit, we will no longer be dependent on the IMR in Kuala Lumpur and can conduct the test here instead,” he said after the signing of a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) between SRDC and Unimas here, today.

Manyin said the collaboration, the first to be funded by SRDC, reflected the good partnership it had with local universities, especially Unimas.

Meanwhile, Unimas’ Institute of Health and Community Medicine director Dr David Perera said a high number of people were seeking treatment for dog bites. There was a need to be able to screen the disease faster on a large number of patients, he said.

Although other test kits were available in the market, some might not be “sensitive” against the disease in Sarawak, he said.

For example, he said, some of the test kits which researchers developed for rabies in Korea were not that “sensitive” in dealing with the disease outbreak in Sarawak.

Perera, who is the lead scientist for the project, also said the ability of the test kit to detect the disease faster would help the relevant authorities make better decisions and act faster to prevent the disease from spreading to other areas in the state.