Guyana gets its 1st embryologist

Dr Balwant Singh’s Hospital on Thursday announced the appointment of the first Guyanese embryologist, Ganesh Persaud, as Head of the In vitro fertilisation (IVF) lab at Dr Balwant Singh’s Hospital.

Ganesh Persaud, originally from Essequibo, is Guyana’s first embryologist. Embryology is the field of medicine concerned with the study and development of embryos. As an embryologist, Ganesh is currently working at Guyana’s only IVF lab, located at the Dr Balwant Singh’s Hospital under the supervision of Dr Madhu Singh— Guyana’s only infertility specialist.
Ganesh moved to Georgetown at the age of 17, when he started studying at the University of Guyana. He completed his Bachelors in Medical Technology and then began working at the Dr Balwant Singh’s Hospital laboratory— where he worked for six years, and later became Head of the laboratory there.

After working with the visiting embryologists at the institution, and also doing preparations for the infertility procedures at the hospital, he was inspired to specialise in this field, and applied to the Dr Balwant Singh’s hospital for a scholarship.
Ganesh completed his training at the Craft Hospital and Research Centre in Kerala, India. Ganesh has just returned from India a few weeks ago and is now the Head of the IVF lab at Dr Balwant Singh’s Hospital. Under his supervision, the lab is expected to grow tremendously over the coming years, with the hopes that the centre will become the largest infertility centres in the Caribbean.
He noted that “in Guyana, it is very common for patients to delay infertility treatment, and to wait until they are in their late 30s or early 40s before they start the process…with increasing maternal age, the quality of eggs released by the ovary decreases and this makes pregnancy very hard”.
Before the hospital started to advertise the infertility services, and Dr Madhu began speaking on this issue, a lot of patients would never seek treatment or not do it through the proper channels.
Ganesh advised that “patients who are not getting pregnant with simple treatments like clomiphene move on to more advanced treatments like intra-uterine insemination and in vitro fertilisation”.
IVF is a process whereby fertilisation of an egg and sperm is completed in the laboratory, after the eggs have been harvested by the gynaecologist.
He noted that “Dr Madhu’s infertility clinic has brought relief to many Guyanese and is now frequented by patients from neighbouring countries like Suriname, and the neighbouring islands, because for the Caribbean, this hospital offers the best price”. He said “the success rates produced by the clinic are on par with that of the clinics in Barbados and Trinidad, and the price is a fraction of that being quoted at those clinics”. He hopes that with his help “the IVF lab will continue to grow and eventually become the largest in the Caribbean”.