Diagnosing infectious diseases at the point-of-care

A major problem with current testing for infectious diseases in Africa is that it focuses on individual diseases and cannot reliably discriminate between them. Since most infectious diseases have the same feverish symptoms, diagnosis is often inaccurate, resulting in thousands of deaths and increased resistance to antimicrobial drugs. Clinical surveys show that up to 30% of patients are treated for malaria without even being infected by it. Considering the approximately 200 million malaria cases worldwide, it is vital that accurate diagnostic tools are developed to distinguish between infectious diseases such as malaria, typhoid, dengue fever and pneumonia, so the right therapies are applied. The EU’s EUR 2.9 million DISCOGNOSIS project has come up with a new diagnostic tool: an easily-portable lab-on-a-disc, which can test for several tropical diseases at the same time, discriminate between them and guide healthcare personnel to proper patient treatment. ‘It is a very simple and cheap system that can...