Microchip detects Malaria in minutes

Scientists from Glasgow University claim they have created a device which can detect malaria within minutes. Doctors have welcomed the development as more travellers go abroad without taking proper precautions against the disease. The flu-like symptoms can be missed until the patient is critically ill.

Scientists at the university have announced an electronic microchip that can detect the type of malaria infecting a patient and find out whether the malaria is resistant to first line drugs. Blood samples are placed in the microchip, which is designed to detect the strain of disease. This means the best drug can be used to treat it.

The university claims that it is the only malaria study of its kind in the U.K. to use the technology. Those with malaria suffer from flu-like symptoms that can go unnoticed until they are critically ill.

“Since 2000, an average of 1700 Britons have been diagnosed with the disease every year, although the number of actual cases is thought to be much higher through under reporting,” the statement from the university said.

Dr. Lisa Ranford-Cartwright is leading the team working on the project by using the new lab-on-a-chip technology that is expected to help doctors treat the disease more quickly as more number of incidences are being reported by the health professionals.

At present, the diagnostic test takes up to 48 hours to determine whether a patient has malaria and even then, doctors are unable to tell whether the parasite is drug resistant, according to her.

“In certain cases, a malaria diagnosis has to be confirmed by DNA amplification which can take another one to two days. The only current way to test for drug resistance is to give patients certain drugs and wait to see if they work,” Ranford-Cartwright said in a statement.

She added, “Our malaria chip should be able to do the whole process in less than 60 minutes, and we hope that by the end of our development project we will have reduced this time further.”

According to the World Health Organization, almost half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria, and an estimated 247 million cases led to nearly 881,000 deaths in 2006.

Malaria is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of south-east Asia and it claims the life of a child every 30 seconds. Its symptoms include a fever and chronic exhaustion, which can turn in to a severe form called cerebral malaria that is caused by Plasmodium falciparum and is considered to be fatal mainly due to late diagnosis.

Malaria transmission in the United States was successfully thwarted in the 1950s. There were 1,505 reported cases of malaria in 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Last year a study revealed more cases of the most dangerous type of malaria than ever before are being brought back to the UK from trips abroad. The Health Protection Agency study identified 6,753 cases of falciparum malaria diagnosed between 2002 and 2006. Experts said many of the cases arose from visits to west Africa made by people visiting relatives and friends.

Project leader Dr Lisa Ranford-Cartwright said: “The current way of diagnosing is using a blood smear on a slide and examining it on a microscope. That will take a good microscopist a good hour to reach a diagnosis, it’s extremely difficult to make that diagnosis accurately. The chip can give us a result in as little as half an hour.”

Dr Heather Ferguson, a malaria researcher, picked up the disease in southern Kenya and it was only spotted by chance when she was giving a blood sample. She said: “Had I not been diagnosed at that moment and caught it within the next 24 hours all those millions of parasites would have replicated one more time, making eight times as many as there had been before, which could very easily have been lethal.”

via BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Glasgow, Lanarkshire and West | Doctors welcome malaria microchip and http://www.vitabeat.com/scientists-develop-microchip-to-detect-malaria-within-minutes/v/10017/