Tuesday 3 July 2018

Bloodless Innovation To Diagnose Malaria Fever...

Sometimes, a number of initiatives and innovations make the whole world come across as one family. Case in point, a youth in Uganda has accepted the challenge to do something significant for humankind.

This 24-year-old engineer from Uganda, Brian Gitta, has invented a faster and low-cost method to test malaria fever symptoms in a patient. For this incredible achievement, Brian has won Africa’s top award for innovation in engineering.

The prize by the UK Royal Academy of Engineering for Africa aims to develop the entrepreneurial and innovative skills of engineers. These kinds of initiatives definitely motivate and inculcate creative skills in youth to focus on and tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems in any field. The young innovators who identify such challenges dedicate themselves to work towards finding out an optimum and most feasible solution that caters to masses.



The first thing that would come to anybody’s mind is what makes his invention unique and better than previous testing methods. The answer is quite simple. This new testing method to diagnose malaria symptoms in a patient is completely bloodless. In fact, there is no need for a fresh blood sample at all in this testing method.

Rather the device has an ability to identify deforming red blood cells (RBCs) in the body that indicate the presence of malaria parasite. What happens actually is the parasite takes charge of the vacuoles in red blood cells in the patient’s body when he or she gets infected. This results in a change in the cell’s shape. 

The new testing device diagnoses this change in the body of the patient without taking a blood sample. Its functioning is quite simple too. It needs just to clip the device onto a patient’s finger to diagnose malaria fever symptoms.

A red beam of light then scans for changes in red blood cells in the body. These changes could be in the color, shape, and concentration of the RBCs. Another plus point of this device is its use that is quite simple and doesn’t require any specialist to operate. Once clipped on a patient’s finger, the device produces results within a few minutes.

The device delivers the test results immediately to the patient’s cell phone. These wonderful and innovative features make this device so simple that it becomes ideally the most suitable for remote areas that lack proper healthcare facilities. 

That means remote rural areas will get benefited the most where a lot of lives are lost just because of lack of facilities or facilities being too far from their areas that it would take a lot of time to visit those locations.

Given lack of diagnosis of malaria fever symptoms, a patient doesn’t receive the right treatment in time. A lack of transport facilities in such areas further deteriorates the cases because of loss of precious time and attention a patient needs. Gitta has named this device ‘Matibabu’ meaning ‘treatment’ in Swahili. The device to detect and identify signs and symptoms of malaria has thus become a point of discussion in the global arena in no time. 

In all other instances, it is always better to use products by reliable brands like Goodknight to keep mosquitoes at bay and avoid diseases like malaria. :)

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