Cheap, handy test can recognize risk of measles

JUNE 26, 2018

A cheap, portable device can warn of a person´s defenselessness to infectious diseases like measles, which kills tens of thousands of people each year, mainly in developing countries, researchers said Wednesday.

The test, called the Measles-Rubella Box uses a finger-prick volume of blood to spot the presence of antibodies against measles and rubella in only thirty five minutes.

Measles kills about 134,000 children per year, and rubella causes some one lac children to be born with birth defects such as deafness.

Researchers brought the device — which is about the size of a toaster oven and uses “lab-on-a-chip” technology made with inkjet printers to manipulate blood samples — to the Kakuma immigrant camp in northwestern Kenya where they tried it on 144 children and caregivers.

“The system had a good ability to determine whether a person was at risk for measles and rubella infection,” Amy Summers, an epidemiologist at the US Centers for Disease Control and anticipation who was involved with the field trial in Kenya, told reporters on a conference call.

This was done by detecting whether a person had antibodies to either measles or rubella in their body, either from a prior infection of measles and rubella or from being vaccinated

Its accuracy “matched the international laboratory standard reference tests of the Kenyan Medical Research Institute for 86 percent of measles samples, and 91 percent of rubella samples,” said study co-author Darius Rackus, post doctoral research associate at the University of Toronto.

The cost per microfluidic cartridge was about $6 at the time of the field study in 2016, but hi-tech advance have since lowered it to about $1 or less, he said.

Researchers hope the device will be useful in remote settings or places where people are at threat of vaccine-preventable diseases and other illnesses.

“This technology would be very functional in places where people are displaced by charitable emergencies, which right now could be in  for occasion with the forced displacement of the Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh,” said Summers.

“So populations who are displaced by humanitarian emergencies are especially vulnerable to vaccine preventable diseases” because they often have low vaccination treatment and go through from overcapacity and underfeeding, she said.

Co-author Aaron Wheeler, a professor at the University of Toronto, said his lab is currently working on a similar lab-on-a-chip test for malaria and other tests for Zika virus.

“And of course, there are many more tests than we have the manpower or economic resources to develop, but that is the vision, that this type of system with its suppleness could be sent out into the world,” he said.