News Articles

Keeping on Point: Ensuring High Quality Point-of-Care Testing East African Leaders Join Together to Develop Country-Specific Plans Point-of-care-testing (POCT), which includes diagnostic testing performed at or near the point of patient care, serves as a powerful but underused tool in resource-limited settings. When performed correctly and in a timely fashion, POCT improves patient retention and… Read More

Once an Ignored Threat, Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Becomes an International Priority Antimicrobial resistance, a phenomenon in which microorganisms are able to survive antimicrobial treatment such that drugs become ineffective, is an ever-growing problem of international public health importance. [1] Present everywhere in the world, drug-resistant parasites, bacteria, viruses, and fungi jeopardise the effective prevention and… Read More

Improving Disease Surveillance Through A Community-Tailored Framework The recent Ebola outbreak exacerbated weak points in disease surveillance, highlighting the need for renewed attention upon disease surveillance systems. These weak points, which may have gone unnoticed had they not been exposed to the unprecedented scale and severity of the Ebola outbreak, meant that many cases were… Read More

Guidance on the Regulation of New Diagnostics in Time of Outbreak At the beginning of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, no regulatory-approved, mass-produced Ebola in vitro diagnostics (IVDs) existed, yet specifics of the disease required timely diagnostic testing. Urgent demand for Ebola IVDs revealed inadequacy of internationally accepted conventional regulatory mechanisms and the need… Read More

Settling the Score: How a Laboratory Network Assessment Tool Can be Used to Score Functionality Before disaster strikes and a local outbreak becomes a global epidemic, how can the international community work together to minimise loss of life and economic upheaval? Viro-immunologist Dr. Pascale Ondoa thinks the answer could lie in a tool used to… Read More

Developing a Laboratory Outbreak Preparedness Score Card: The Sierra Leone Field Experience Recognising the need for a coordinated plan to address all aspects of laboratory reconstruction in Sierra Leone, Dr. Isatta Wurie of the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) and the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) worked with the Ministry of Health and… Read More

Reconstructing Laboratory Systems: How to Rebuild in Ebola-Affected Countries As the world’s most devastating Ebola epidemic draws to a close, governments and local institutions are looking to the future. Emerging from the urgent task of crisis management, experts are asking what steps can be taken to rebuild badly shaken health infrastructures. In the words of… Read More

Bridging the Treatment Gap in Africa: Global Coalition Works to Reduce Cost of HIV Testing in Infants Diagnostics Access Initiative partners announce significantly lower testing costs to improve access to life-saving HIV testing Life-saving treatment for HIV-exposed infants is more accessible now than ever before thanks to a new commitment by Roche Diagnostics to lower… Read More

Gaining Momentum to End AIDS by 2030 New Phnom Penh Statement builds on global effort to improve quality and access to HIV testing HIV-related point-of-care testing (POCT) technologies have become widely available, and they serve as a catalyst to attaining the UNAIDS-led 90-90-90 HIV treatment targets [1] by improving access to diagnostics in resource-limited countries…. Read More

Mozambique Achieves Accreditation for its National TB Reference Laboratory ASLM SLIPTA programme integral to success Imagine visiting your local doctor with a severe illness and worsening cough. When the laboratory test results come back confirming you have tuberculosis – do you wonder if they are accurate? For many people living in Africa, this is an… Read More