You definitely need not to be told how well Malaria seems to be a well known name in Nigeria and of course Sub Sahara Africa, recently The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 estimated that over 438,000 people died from malaria mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.
But the good news, soonest you wont have to wait till you get knocked off your feet by malaria before you actually strike first, John Lewandowski, a 26-year-old PhD student in mechanical engineering at MIT made a mechanical device called RAM (Rapid Assessment of Malaria) that can diagnose malaria from a drop of blood in five seconds.
How does this actually works, ?
John explained that With a single drop of blood, Lewandowski’s RAM device can accurately detect the presence of malaria using Magneto-Optical Detection as early as a week before symptoms even present themselves. Like a pregnancy test, what RAM does it to simply analyzes the sample and returns either a positive or negative response.
Aside the outer box and of course the LCD display of the device, the RAM is made up of a circuit board, a laser, some magnets and interestingly an SD card reader.
Has the Ram being tested??
Interestingly, it has, a recent filed test in India yielded good results that was accurate 93% to 97% of the time, and the company will launch another new face of field trial this summer in Nigeria that hopes to test as many as 5,000 patients.
Leave a Comment