> Armed with this 50-cent test, community health workers with little training can determine in minutes with 99 percent accuracy whether someone has malaria or not. Last year, we deployed 200 million of them in Africa alone.
I found this statement incredible. My perspective is from someone who had a Malaria scare after coming back from Asia this summer and passing through Krakow, Poland.
I had numerous blood tests to determine whether I had malaria or not, taking hours to get the results, and even then an expert from the hospital told me they could not be sure and would need to take further tests when my fever shoots up to determine if the spores are actually there.
If we have a 50c test that has been rolled out 200 million times to Africa, I find it astonishing that a modern medical center in Poland would not have access to them.
From poking around reading CDC and WHO websites on malaria RDTs, they stress that since RDTs have a higher limit of detection than blood microscopy tests (which are apparently the gold standard), and also can only detect 4 common strains of malaria (at least two strains are not covered by RDTs), then negative results should (when possible) be verified by a microscopy test either way.
Given your situation then, it doesn't actually make sense to use a RDT on you. Basically, if you have what the medical infrastructure and low enough rates of malaria, you may as we just do the microscopy test all the time to ensure that you do the right treatment.
In your specific case, if they were having troubles detecting the parasite in a microscopy test, then likely they would have trouble detecting it with RDTs as well given its high limit of detection.
Probably this is because tropical diseases are rather rare in Poland (not a big surprise). As far as I know the only place in Poland where you can find someone with practice and expertiese is Gdansk (big port in Poland) - they need to treat sailors occasionally.
It wouldn't surprise me if it is because it had not tested and licensed for EU regulations yet. Bureaucracy seems to trump common sense on these things.
I found this statement incredible. My perspective is from someone who had a Malaria scare after coming back from Asia this summer and passing through Krakow, Poland.
I had numerous blood tests to determine whether I had malaria or not, taking hours to get the results, and even then an expert from the hospital told me they could not be sure and would need to take further tests when my fever shoots up to determine if the spores are actually there.
If we have a 50c test that has been rolled out 200 million times to Africa, I find it astonishing that a modern medical center in Poland would not have access to them.