European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

SELECTING THE BETTER DIAGNOSTICS FOR MALARIA AT POINT OF CARE AREAS

Prudhvi Chand Mallepaddi*, Soumendra Nath Maity, Revathi Poonati, Rathnagiri Polavarapu, Usha Kiranmayi Mangamuri and Sudhakar Podha*

ABSTRACT

Background- Malaria is a fatal life threatening parasitic infection with leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Rapid accurate diagnosis is the fundamental for treatment and control of malaria. Immuno chromatographic tests are the only diagnostics that meet the demand. Despite the introduction of rapid devices over a decade ago, no promising studies to evaluate the better diagnostics for malaria. Aim- The present study was aimed to evaluate simple, inexpensive, accurate, reliable, easily available better diagnostics for rapid detection of malarial at point of care (POC) areas. Settings and Design- The sample collection process and the clinical study were carried out at Department of Research MNR medical college and Hospital Sangareddy. Malarial diagnosis was carried out at Genomix Molecular Diagnostics Pvt. Ltd, Hyderabad. Methods and Material- The collected samples were tested with rapid kits and results were confirmed by microscopy and PCR assays. Results- The study includes 1403 samples collected from the patients, of which 1227 were clinically suspected cases and 176 from consecutive feverish patients. Over all the microscopy and the malaria antigen ICT exhibit more or less similar sensitivity and specificicty i.e both the assays had 99.70 % sensitivity, 100% specificity, 100 % PPV, 99.88% NPV and 99.91% efficiency respectively. Conclusion- Taking all these drawbacks in to consideration rapid test kits are considered to be the best for diagnosis at field level. Hence, we have developed Malaria pf/pv antigen rapid kit for field deployable diagnosis which is simple, rapid, accurate, reliable, inexpensive, user friendly, POC, highly sensitive species specific effective diagnostic test compared to other type of diagnostics. Of the two rapid kits developed Malaria pf/pv antigen kit is found be more accurate and sensitive then to Malaria pf/pv antibody rapid kits.

Keywords: Point of Care (POC), Immuno chromatographic test (ICT), Plasmodium Lactate Dehydrogenase (pLDH), Histidine Rich Protein II (HRPII), Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), Positive Predictive Value (PPV), Negative Predictive Value (NPV).