By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
This must be the week for health-related tech news. Yesterday we posted a story on the “Malaria Monitor“; today we have news of a disposable microchip under development by STMicroelectronics that can confirm a human case of bird flu. The hope is to have development complete before the next flu season (though I’m not sure the flu season has to do with avian flu 
).
The company is working with Singapore-based medical diagnostics company Veredus Laboratories Pte Ltd., which launched last year a test kit which detects the H5N1 strain in both humans and poultry within about four hours.
The diagnostic is built on STMicroelectronics’ “In-Check” platform, which is described as a complete laboratory on a chip.
The lab-on-chip uses a sample of blood or a swab from the throat or nose to detect the virus, which is read by a machine. Source: Reuters
We Say: Great that we will soon be able to tell a person if they have this disease more quickly, but I’m still looking for protection, not detection!
Seasonal flu is considered different to pandemic flu by the health profession because they behave quite differently.
* pandemic influenza may occur during any season
seasonal epidemics usually occur in winter
* pandemic influenza may affect any age group – including young healthy adults (who usually make up the bulk of a nation’s workforce)
seasonal epidemics usually affect the young, elderly and immunocompromised predominantly
* pandemic influenza virulence (ability to infect and cause severe illness) can vary and is difficult to predict prior to significant numbers of clinical cases
* pandemic influenza usually occurs worldwide once every few decades
seasonal influenza is usually annual and outbreaks are usually limited to smaller geographical areas
* because a number of adaptations need to occur for an influenza strain to become a pandemic strain, there is an inevitable delay in being able to produce vaccine to combat pandemic flu
a seasonal influenza vaccine is usually available prior to significant numbers of clinical cases
In other words, the virus has to mutate to become human to human transmission and then a few people have to catch it before we can get something we can reliably develop a vaccine for. Happily, it hasn’t mutated to pass between people.
And while initial transmissions normally carries a high mortality rate (50% or greater; about 50% of people who’ve caught H5N1 have died) once the strain adapts to humans, mortality tends to drop to at most 2.5%
Source: http://www.publichealthy.com/flupandemic.htm which is about the NHS’s (UK public health service) flu pandemic planning
Thanks for the great info, Dawn. That’s why I was asking why they would care when the flu season started. Avian flu doesn’t have a season, per se.
I have put a Public Health website for Bourbon Co., Kansas. It contains many resources and research about H5N1.
I would like to know more information about this chip.
Thank you.