As it suffer now , there ’s no truly effective method of protect against malaria . Vaccines arenotoriously hard to make , and it ’s almost unacceptable to detect the transmission in its former stage — until now , that is . And it ’s allthanks to extremely advance , tank - crusade military hardware .
The bit of tech pulling double responsibility is called Focal Plane Array , a detector that was originally used as part of a heat - seeking , anti - tank projectile launcher . Butwhen researchers filch the software package up to an infrared imaging microscope , they were capable to detect the unique infrared key signature of the parasite ’s fat acids in potential victims ’ origin . Meaning that a program once used to put down could end up bring through hundreds of thousands of life by detecting the disease before symptoms even have a chance to come up .
It ’s not just the fact that other detection give us a major advantage over the parasite , though . The new signal detection system come with a whole legion of benefit , as Vocativ explain :
It gives an reflex diagnosis in as footling as four minutes and does n’t require the kind of specialist technicians that are often strong to come by in the develop world , where malaria often appear . It can also detect the parasite in a single blood cell — a true needle in a haystack .
Researchers are getting ready to set out test the potentially life - saving tech in hospital clinics in Thailand . And for a killer as lethal as malaria , those trials ca n’t set about soon enough . [ Vocativ ]
Image via Shutterstock / Dmitrijs Bindemanis
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