New Portable Diagnostic Test For Ebola And Malaria Has Big Public Health Implications

High fever, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain: These are all early symptoms of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. They’re also symptoms of malaria, a mosquito-borne blood infection that’s endemic in regions where Ebola tends to break out.

For public health officials working in West Africa during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, distinguishing between the two wasn’t always easy, says Dr. John Connor, associate professor of microbiology and researcher at Boston University. Connor is part of an international team working on a portable, easy-to-use, battery-powered test that can identify Ebola, as well as malaria and other diseases, in less than 30 minutes. Doing so, however, was critical.

“During the outbreak, one of the things that was, unfortunately, painfully obvious was that getting good diagnostics to the point that they were needed was difficult,” he says. “[Our] goal was to make something really simple where you don’t need a tremendous amount of training and people can pick it up very quickly. Current tests for Ebola are much more cumbersome, and for patients in rural areas, getting results can take days.”