Dr. Yasar Mehmood Yousafzai Of KMU-PHRL Nominated For Tamgha-e-Imtiaz

Faculty member and Director of Khyber Medical University (KMU), Peshawar Public Health Reference Laboratory (PHRL), Dr. Yasar Mehmood Yousafzai has been nominated for Tamgha-e-Imtiaz by President of Pakistan

PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 1st Sep, 2020 ) :Faculty member and Director of Khyber Medical University (KMU), Peshawar Public Health Reference Laboratory (PHRL), Dr. Yasar Mehmood Yousafzai has been nominated for Tamgha-e-Imtiaz by President of Pakistan.

It is worth mentioning here that Dr. Yasar Yousafzai has been involved in diagnostic pathology for more than a decade.

After completing his MBBS, he started career as pathologist at Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital, Lahore in 2006. In 2015, he completed his PhD from the University of Glasgow, UK after which, he chose to come back and serve his country by joining KMU-Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Peshawar.

Dr. Yasar helped establish the country's first provincial public health laboratory in 2017. However, this laboratory wasn't yet been approved for testing on dangerous pathogens.

In January 2020, when no one had anticipated the upcoming threat by the coronavirus, Dr. Yasar realized the threat early and assembled a team of professionals from the university and started preparing to manage the 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 bio safety level 3.

As global supply chains of personal protective equipment (PPEs) dried up, he used innovative local solutions to protect himself and the team and kept the working going.

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 the duration of one month, his laboratory was able to increase the testing capacity from 40 per day to 1000 per day and performed more than 24 thousand tests in less than two months.

Currently, his laboratory was one of the largest coronavirus testing laboratories of the country whose performance was 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; instead 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.

The Vice Chancellor KMU Prof. Dr. Zia ul 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 Corona pandemic.

He said that the role of KMU was not only being recognized in teaching and research, but KMU was showing its potential to be on the front-line of KP's health system.