Category Archives: Research

Africa, Community Support, Education, General interest, Health Education, Healthcare, Research

The Freedom of No Malaria!

Since 2916 Dr Andrew Macnab’s (Rose Charities Canada / Rose Uganda Support Group) amazing schools based malaria abatement program in Uganda has been delivering outstanding results. The highly endemic disease accounts for thousands of missing days of education in a young population desperate to attain the maximum benefit from school attendance. Teachers are trained to recognize early symptoms and then confirm them with a simple and relatively cheap kit test. Artemsia based drugs (as approved by the WHO ) can be then started immediately in situ, and, being quick acting, take effect early to reduce the childs convalescent absence period from days to possibly only hours. (https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/45/6/1759/2670325 )

Children, teachers, parents all love the program and its success has been attested to now for the last 5 years. A huge success for Uganda, Rose teams but above everything the kids and their families !

Africa, General interest, Healthcare, Research

Malaria breath-print: the next generation diagnostic test ?

Rose Charities in rural  Uganda has an expanding early malaria school diagnosis and treatment  program which is proving extremely successful.  However it utilizes a (relatively) expensive test to make the original diagnosis which can be a limiting factor.

Research  has recently shown that children with malaria have a different breath smell and this could be the way to a new, cheap and simple malaria test for the near future.

The current tests are the traditional microscope examination of blood films or the more sophisticated and expensive  immunofluoresent tests.

But blood-smear microscopy, is difficult to implement in resource-poor settings, and the immunofluoresent rapid diagnostic testing has developed some limitations in that some forms of the malaria parasite are lacking the histidine rich protein II (HRP II) antigen altogether, which make them “invisible” to current HRP II-based diagnostic testing.

A cheap breath diagnostic test could bypass the need for any of the above tests and universally revolutionize malaria diagnosis both for the Rose programs and everywhere.

 

https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/astmh/69106