Posted on 08/29/2006 8:58:15 PM PDT by neverdem
In an advance that speeds up diagnosis of the most dangerous avian flu, scientists have developed a detailed influenza test that takes less than 12 hours, federal health officials said yesterday.
The new technology, a microchip covered with bits of genetic material from many different flu strains, cuts the typical time needed for diagnosis of the A(H5N1) flu to less than a day from a week or more. In addition, rather than giving just a yes-or-no result, it usually reveals which flu a human or an animal has.
That means that public health officials investigating, for example, a flu outbreak in poultry or in humans in a remote Asian or African village will be able to decide quickly whether to kill thousands of birds or to treat hundreds of potentially exposed people with expensive antiviral drugs.
Right now, ascertaining whether a flu is of the lethal A(H5N1) strain requires that a sample be frozen and shipped to a highly secure laboratory, usually in a major city like Atlanta or Hong Kong, where the virus can be grown in eggs, isolated and genetically sequenced. That process takes four to five days plus shipping time and runs the risk of samples defrosting in transit and being ruined.
The new test, called FluChip, can be performed in any laboratory that can amplify bits of genetic material; many countries have such laboratories in their national capitals, if not in provincial hospitals. Samples need not be frozen, and because only bits of genetic material are multiplied rather than whole viruses, the work can be done in laboratories with lower biosecurity levels.
Nancy J. Cox, chief of the influenza branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said the chip “really allows us to get a lot of information about a virus in...”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Very interesting. This has ramifications for diagnosing other viruses quickly.
Excellent news.
Now, I wonder how many years it will take to get an adequate number of chips made, shipped and people trained to use them? A couple years at best?
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