Beckman 1st County Firm to Make Deal : Contract: The company has filled a $2.5-million emergency order for medical diagnostic equipment in the war-torn country.

Beckman Instruments Inc. said Monday it has filled a $2.5-million emergency order for medical diagnostic instruments and chemicals for four hospitals in Kuwait, making it the first Orange County firm to obtain a contract with the war-torn nation.

The contract between Beckman and the Kuwait Ministry of Health is expected to be a prelude to much larger orders for equipment that Kuwait will need to replenish the clinical laboratories of its devastated hospitals.

Beckman, a Fullerton-based manufacturer of research and diagnostic equipment, is one of more than 20 Orange County firms that are seeking contracts to help Kuwait rebuild in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

Almost all of Kuwait’s hospitals were “cleaned out” of diagnostic equipment by the Iraqi military while it occupied Kuwait, said Ed Ehrman, Beckman’s director of marketing.

Ehrman said Beckman has done business in the Middle East since the early 1970s and over the years has sold equipment to 11 hospitals as well as university research laboratories in Kuwait. This long track record may give Beckman an advantage in winning postwar contracts.

“This is only the beginning,” Ehrman predicted. “The Phase One plan was to get four hospitals up and running for critical-care patients.”

He said the Kuwaiti government was still operating in exile in December when it requested Beckman to bid on the initial equipment contract. Beckman’s contract with the Kuwaiti health ministry was signed Jan. 16--the day the war began--in Washington as part of Kuwait’s emergency and recovery program.

Terms of the contract were kept confidential until now at the request of the Kuwaiti government, which was concerned about possible destruction of the medical equipment by terrorists, Ehrman said.

Instruments included in the contract are all basic systems for clinical laboratories, including routine analyzers and reagents for emergency tests to determine the concentration of various components in human blood, urine and spinal fluids.

Ehrman said the Beckman equipment has been delivered to warehouses “in other countries just beyond the Kuwait border” and will be moved into Kuwait once the government decides which hospitals are best prepared to use it.

But first, he said, Kuwait will have to restore some basic services. “You can’t run the equipment without electricity and water,” he said.