WIKIMEDIA, PHR-ISRAELThe greatest obstacle to the care and control of diseases in the developing world is the absence of accurate and affordable diagnostic tests. This deficit can cause delayed diagnosis that lead to less effective and more expensive treatments, as well as the spread of disease to others. Worse, lack of sufficient diagnostics can result in misdiagnoses, improper treatment, and sometimes death. And even when diagnostics are available, they are often too costly, or at least more costly than the drugs to treat a perceived disease, further contributing to drug resistance. The net effect is endangered lives, wasted resources, and the potential to create an even bigger health problem.
There are many challenges to achieving a successful diagnostic. Being inexpensive alone is not sufficient. It also has to be able to perform to high standards in challenging settings, such as villages across much of Africa where a small percentage of health facilities have access to a reliable power supply or towns and villages in the Indian subcontinent where operating temperatures are regularly above 40°C. As a result, such tests have to be affordable, sensitive, specific, user-friendly, robust and rapid, equipment-free, and deliverable (ASSURED tests). Given all these challenges, developing new diagnostics for resource limited settings continues to be underfunded.
The potential to create inexpensive and effective diagnostic tests from a technological point of view should be achievable, however. For example multiple tests for malaria ...
