One of the biggest issues facing the world today is the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The problem isn’t the condition itself, it’s how destitute the countries which are worst effected are. This relative level of poverty means that the countries themselves are incapable of paying for and then maintaining the systems required to combat the diseases. Things like advanced health facilities, well qualified practitioners of healthcare and educations are severely lacking and without them the treatment of illnesses as serious as HIV or AIDS becomes much more difficult.
Most of the treatment of diseases like HIV and AIDS is carried out by foreign volunteers. These people generally aren’t paid and put huge amounts of hours into saving lives. A lot of what they do is life threatening as many locals aren’t fond of this outside aid. A lot of what’s necessary for the proper treatment of conditions requires the use of a lab. It doesn’t matter how many volunteers you have if you can’t then test the samples you gather. This used to mean transporting samples back to the nearest lab which could be hundreds of miles away. This was costly and time consuming.
A new device has been released recently which is due to totally change that. It’s a hand held mobile device which can test for HIV using a finger prick. It takes around 15 minutes for the device to determine whether a patient has AIDS or not and has around about the same accuracy as testing in the lab has. The devices are all linked with a central sever which does all the actual analysis and records the data. This means doctors and health practitioners worldwide will have immediate access to the results, meaning they’ll be able to chart trends without too much difficulty.
It will be a short time before we see devices like this put into full use. The fact is that they could change everything and start to make the war on HIV and AIDS look less like a losing fight!
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