Lab woes slow polio tests

On Christmas Eve in 2025, there was no Santa or candies for a seven-year-old from Makhetha Township in Blantyre, who was diagnosed with a once-eliminated polio virus. The unvaccinated child was on oxygen treatment at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, surrounded by doctors who collected his stools to understand his breathing difficulty. The patient and caregivers had to wait until January 22 this year to confirm that polio had paralysed his chest.

The 29-day suspense is not unusual for the country to watch in the global fight against the return of polio. Malawi endures a long wait for the results of stools flown to South Africa for laboratory tests. “The stools are analysed in South Africa because we do not have an authorised lab,” says Joyce Beyamu.

“We only keep samples for transit to South Africa.” She is the national surveillance officer at the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), which leads nationwide efforts to track and avert the possible polio comeback. The country’s first polio case since 2023 was confirmed alongside the discovery of similar poliovirus in stools collected on September 8 2025 from Manase and Soche sewage sites in Blantyre. Beyamu narrates: “Clinical assessments of every child who presents with sudden paralysis of limbs and other parts help us understand whether routine immunisation and reactive vaccinations are truly protecting our children.

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“We also take samples from 11 sewage sites across the country. We may not tell who has the virus, but it helps us understand what is happening in the community. The results usually arrive two weeks or more.” The waiting period includes a day or two for clinical staff to dispatch a specimen to the Public Health Institute of Malawi (Phim) in Area 3, Lilongwe.

The national laboratory must clear the consignment for flight to South Africa, where analysis typically takes about a week. “The period can go up to 35 days in worst-case scenarios, even though the sample quality and the reliability of the outcome wane with time,” the EPI official says. Global experts last inspected Phim labs in 2023, when a 15-year-old in Ndirande Township, near Makhetha, was found with wild poliovirus type 1.

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