topnaman | Malaria blog

My brother is amazing. For his senior design project as a biomedical engineer, he is developing an inexpensive platform for the diagnosis of infectious diseases (covered by the News & Observer). Pavak sought out technical and business development experts, put together a great team of students, and spent countless hours building an imaging cytometer – [...]

A very interesting malaria case was reported in the CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases journal (open access). Theunissen et al. describe a patient who contracted Plasmodium falciparum malaria in Belgium despite not having  visited any malaria endemic area for nine years! What happened here? A number of possibilities exist. Relapse from a previous infection is not [...]

PLOS Medicine (open access! – I enjoy supporting journals in this format) did it again. The journal has carried some great exchanges between scientific “clans” on contentious topics which tend to be both lively and informative. A previous debate included whether or not data from Demographic Surveillance Systems (DSS), a form of long term demographic [...]

This is cool. Often much research feels far removed from everyday applications and practical concerns. So it is terribly rewarding to see a skunk works type creation that has great potential for how we deliver care. The CellScope is a microscope attachment for cellular phones which is designed to allow field workers to take images [...]

Much of the world still diagnoses malaria clinically (based on symptoms alone without testing for the presence of the parasite). Recently, a Liverpool team working in Mozambique examined the cost to individual patients resulting from the clinical diagnosis of malaria (Malaria Journal – open access). The findings were striking but certainly not surprising. 23 percent [...]