In the general silence of the Western media, the second largest Ebola outbreak in history has been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo for several weeks, with hundreds of deaths.
Since the first patients were diagnosed in North Kivu province in late summer, experts from the World Health Organization and other public health groups have been working to contain the spread of the virus and, given the emergency, have resorted to several experimental vaccines, licensed for human administration even before approval by regulatory agencies, under a protocol for compassionate use.
One of the difficulties in preventing the spread of virus outbreaks is the lack of rapid and accurate diagnostic tests. Currently, blood must be drawn from infected suspects and the samples sent to a laboratory for analysis: the process takes several days, and during this time infected people may continue to move within the community even when they should be quarantined.
As you can read in Science Translational Medicine, a potentially revolutionary breakthrough comes from an international research team that has developed a portable, battery-powered device that can detect the presence of Ebola virus particles in a small blood sample in less than 30 minutes.
In early evaluations, conducted in both animal and human models, the device correctly identified 90 percent of Ebola cases and provided only 2.1 percent false positives.
The researchers were surprised by an unexpected fact: although developed for the diagnosis of Ebola, the test proved capable of indentifying malaria, with 100 percent sensitivity and 99.6 percent specificity, and Lassa fever.
The test makes use of surface-amplified Raman spectroscopy, commonly called Sers, a technique that exploits the amplification of Raman scattering by molecules absorbed on an irregular metal surface: normal cells, viruses, and the malaria parasite reflect light in different, recognizable ways, which the device is able to intercept. “If the results are confirmed,” the authors wrote , “the technique may be useful in outbreaks of febrile-type infectious diseases.
