Challenges of a Pandemic
Pandemics put pressure on essential workers that cannot adequately keep up. As with triage it is essential to identify who needs critical attention, and conduct this assessment quickly. While this will hopefully save more lives, it may also ensure the right treatment is given at the right time, ensuring there is a reduces waste to the health system.
Unfortunately, we have entered the age of the pandemic, and it is more than likely that pandemics will happen with much more frequency. This could be associated with an exponential increase in the population, the mis-prescription of drugs and associated quantities leading to resistant pathogen strains and societies ignorant or selfish, putting pressure on the healthcare system.
Diagnostic immunoassay
So, how do you determine in a pandemic situation who needs what treatment and when. Thankfully the human body helps you with this. When infection occurs, the immune system produces key proteins that can be used to identify different disease states. As we have seen with Covid, a common trait of contagion is that an individual may have an asymptomatic stage that can last for weeks, such as in the case of super-spreaders. These contagious, yet pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic individuals are unidentifiable in real-time and can only be detected if symptoms manifest after they have already potentially infected many others. This makes it critical to identify pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers to aid reducing the spread of infection, and while this will not help failings of social responsibilities during a pandemic it will help reduce the time of the pandemic.
Waiting for Results
Thankfully a novel ELISA system that utilizes biomarkers to identify viral or bacterial pathogens exist with results being available within 15 minutes. The equipment is lightweight, portable and relatively cheap compared to other methods. Diagnostic immunoassay holds the with reagents already present in cartridge form; clean, sterile, easily used an disposed of. Blood sample are taken and placed inside the cartridge directly. Once complete the cartridge is placed in the ELISA testing device and a covid severity test for example conducted. Any pathogen is detected and what it is and what stage of the infection process.
Once the covid severity test has been completed the doctor can assess what treatment for the sufferer’s stage of infection is needed. This can free up oxygen devices and intensive care staff depending on the stage the infection was present at.
Due to the speed and convenience of the covid severity testing patients can be monitored consistently to quickly check whether the patient needs to be moved to a different treatment process before symptoms get worse.
Through effective treatment there is a shorter turnaround time in hospitals and patients will be able to go home quicker and with validation that the contagious stage has passed.
These diagnostic immunoassay tests due to their portability and convenience may be situated at ports and airports to help test workers that need to travel during a pandemic due to the fast turnaround on results. Mobile or remote testing could be conducted with this system, ensuring people in more remote villages and hamlets can get tested.
Summary
As this method utilizes blood samples for diagnostic immunoassay testing it can pick up on hidden infections that other tests are not able to pick up on. Testing only takes 15 minutes to get results back and can indicate the stage of the infection to help allow doctors to provide relevant treatment. Equipment and cartridges are low cost and have a small footprint, enabling testing to be conducted by mobile units anywhere.
