Home Ebola testing with a Tricorder? There's an app for that Last year, if you’d walked off a flight from West Africa running a high fever, you’d very quickly find yourself quarantined to test for the Ebola virus. The length of your stay in quarantine would depend on how long it took to run the required tests. A genetic test remains the gold standard for infectious agents. Every …
And how do you know the iphone isn't an integral part of the kit? Especially since it doesn't have to be an iphone - any landfill android could be made to do the job.
Unless the only requirement is blue led for yes, red led for no, having a phone handle the comms and potentially a value add of important details on a good screen, plus ability to mail/phone/sms the data around it seems like the phone is a bit of a no brainer.
Plus not needing either a stoopid battery pack or a tether to a wall wart where mains coverages cannot be guaranteed. Pi's/Arduino's have their place. This aint one of them.
Dumb suggestion from a pi-boi tbh.
Presumably there's an app on the iPhone that does some number crunching to produce the results. The PCR kit just produces numbers, they have to be interpreted to give the yes/no answer. Using a phone allows easily sending results to where they need to go, network connectivity if wifi is not available, ability to call/text to alert the proper organizations when a positive result is found, etc.
Given how expensive the PCR kit 'peripheral' is, worrying about the price of an iPhone was probably not on their radar. The company that makes the PCR kit may not even have an Android version of their app.
Massive data points concerning an entire aspect of our biology that we have next to no knowledge of. I think this is guaranteed to bring some insights into how our individual biome is changed by outside factors, and at what point that change becomes dangerous for us.
For science, this can only be a good thing. If the information is handled responsibly, of course.
And that's the major stumbling block.
"I think you will find that it was West Africa, not East, that had Ebola."
And I suspect that you'll also find that Zika is only transmissible via blood or other _extremely_ intimate contacts. That's not something usually quarantined for (also, unless you're preggers, Zika's relatively benign and the jury's still out on the microcephaly link)
There are more reasons to worry about Zika
Although there is no evidence yet that Zika can be transmitted by other types of mosquitos, its a possibility.
Sexual transmission has been identified in a (small) number of cases, an unlucky mutation could make it more likely.
Finally, the link to microephaly is getting is stonger every week and more effects on fetuses are also coming to light: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2079985-zika-virus-disease-renamed-to-reflect-range-of-impacts-on-fetus/
From the article you reference:
1. there are all of forty-two pregnant women in Brazil with the Zika virus.
2. 70% of them have normal fetuses. That's a whole twelve fetuses with abnormalities.
Here's a more balanced viewpoint:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/02/16/zika-virus.aspx
From the article above:
1. Brazil has a population that is 70% of that of the United States.
2. Brazil has reported just over 400 cases of microcephaly so far, 17 of which tested positive for the Zika virus (a whole 4.25% of all microcephaly cases so far).
3. The United States has approximately 25,000 cases of microcephaly per year without the Zika virus.
4. There are plenty of weird chemicals that have been linked to birth defects sprayed in the areas of Brazil where the microcephaly cases are reported.
So, what are the odds that a virus we've known about for almost 70 years is suddenly causing shrunken heads. Looks like we'd be smarter to look at other factors instead of shitting our pants about this.
"On the spot genetic testing = quick and easy DNA database."
More like matching photographs.
"Does this sequence show up anywhere? (yes/no)"
As long as samples aren't retained, you can be relatively sure that noone's made a full DNA sequencer small enough to attach to a smartphone..... yet.
So today it may be appearance of a fever, who makes that call with the reasonable medical knowledge?
Will Joe or Josephine Bloggs be allowed to decline such a test at a country's port?
Tomorrow, it may just be your appearance that warrants selection. And as noted in earlier post ... all that lovely data just swirling around like glup in the beaker
"Will Joe or Josephine Bloggs be allowed to decline such a test at a country's port?"
You can't decline now. The only difference here is the speed of the test and the portability of it. They were already doing the genetic testing you just had to wait in quarantine longer. Present data protection law already covers this perfectly; you're only allows to keep people's data for as long as it is useful for the task you collected it for. Carparks are required to ditch the ANPR as you exit the carpark assuming you've paid, and border control are required to ditch your genetic data if you're found clean within a reasonable time period. They are not allowed to store and analyse it without having a good reason.
Once these become home kits though, then you'll need to decide whether to upload your info to the cloud. Given the likely processing requirements you'd probably have to to use the device, but then the device is only useful if we gather sufficient data to make it meaningful anyway so catch 22. Personally I am worried about the consequences for privacy, but I think the benefits to mankind outweigh that. I also think anyone abusing the data would very quickly be slapped down by society. At the sort of scale we're talking about these things tend to self regulate - even Facebook put privacy controls in eventually!
In any given test method for a pathogenic disease, there will be an overall accuracy (as a function of the nature of the test method, sampling of eg blood, the 'variety' of the pathogen, operator ability, and the sheer bloody randomness of nature).
This leads into the descriptors of test performance - Sensitivity, specificity, Positive predictive value and Negative Predictive value. And test/device design and methodology of use can affect these.
For Ebola you'd want a highly (pref 100%) sensitive test with a high positive predictive value - ie it picks up everyone with the disease. The downside might be that it is not 100% specific, meaning it might show you have the disease even though you haven't; leading possibly to a period of stress for the poor individual until follow up testing fails to confirm the initial result.
And you have to factor in the variability of the disease. Run trials on a test for disease on one continent and you ought to repeat it in the country on another continent to confirm that it works to the same performance level against the genotype prevalent there (local validation).
http://ceaccp.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/6/221.full
For Ebola you'd want a highly (pref 100%) sensitive test
Assuming that you're trying to rule out disease. Be aware you will have many more false positives than true positives, which may swamp your ability to care for everyone...
Baysian theory trumps tests: it all depends on the pretest probability. If you test everyone in the UK for Ebola, you will get some false positives and no true positives (at the moment); if you tweak your test to achieve closer to 100% sensitivity you will still get no true positives but given the cost to specificity your false positives will increase, probably dramatically.
"... inject the samples into the specimen containers ..."
Meaning what exactly? Spit? Blood? Hairs? A bit of skin? Any other body fluids?
"The expensive machine that goes ‘ping!’ has become the smartphone that surfs Bing."
It's just too bad that nothing really rhymes with G00gle, isn't it?
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