Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases

Most Common NTDs Causes and Treatments

POC diagnostics delivers rapid information for patient care. The common platform is the lateral flow immunoassay. Recently, emerging molecular diagnostics have met requirements for speed, low cost, and ease of use for POC applications. A major driver for POC development is the ability to diagnose infectious diseases at sites with a limited infrastructure. The potential use in both wealthy and resource-limited settings has fueled an intense effort to build on existing technologies and to generate new technologies for the diagnosis of a broad spectrum of infectious diseases. POC diagnostics also reduce the reliance on presumptive treatment and thereby facilitate antibiotic control. Rapid diagnostic tests work by detecting analyte that are found in or extracted from clinical samples. There are two primary types of analytes: microbial antigens and patient antibodies that are specific for microbial antigens.  However, there are emerging molecular technologies that enable nucleic acid-based approaches at the POC.