Advancing with new diagnostic methods and investing in building up the capacities of health professionals featured among the objectives of the Practical Genetic Diagnosis Laboratory Course run by CISA at the David Bernardino Pediatric Hospital in Luanda.

Arriving from Uige, Luanda, Bengo and Benguela, the 22 trainees came from backgrounds ranging from medicine, the pharmaceutical sciences and clinical analysis to biology, veterinary medicine, microbiology and the agrarian sciences. They spent the three days of the course developing techniques for extracting DNA through recourse to different processes and the subsequent applications for identifying mutations as well as determining the exogenous DNA to the pathologies endemic in Africa: Drepanocytosis in the case of mutations and the detection of Plasmodium sp. in the case of determining exogenous DNA.