Acute Febrile Illnesses
Acute febrile illness is a term to describe fever without a clear localizing source. These can be caused by a wide array of infections. Unfortunately a pathogen is not always identified through conventional methods like blood culture or serology. Our research has focused on developing a research diagnostic that can rapidly and accurately identify acute febrile illness agents. We are using these diagnostics in global surveillance studies and to identify the cause of outbreaks in Tanzania.
Acute Febrile Illness TaqMan Array Card
We developed a real-time PCR-based TaqMan array card (TAC) that can simultaneously detect 26 AFI-associated organisms, including 15 viruses, 8 bacteria, and 3 protozoa. This TAC can be used in field settings for rapid screening in outbreak investigations or pathogen surveillance.
Figure 1 from Liu et al., J Clin Microbiol 2016
Zikavirus surveillance
In partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we are using a version of the AFI TAC above to aid in Zikavirus (and acute febrile illness) surveillance to 7 different countries throughout the world. The UVA portion of this partnership has involved the deployment of the cards to the various sites and giving the necessary training to the local staff to process blood samples, prepare the TAC, and interpret the results.
Malaria TaqMan Array Card
According to the WHO, there were 212 million new cases of malaria worldwide in 2015. The bulk of cases were in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by the South-East Asia and Eastern Mediterranean regions1. Anti-malarial drug resistance exacerbates the global malaria burden and complicates eradication efforts. We developed a TaqMan Array Card that includes 87 assays for species identification and for the detection of mutations in Plasmodium falciparum contributing to resistance to chloroquine, atovaquone, pyrimethamine, sulfadoxine, and artemesinin. This card is capable of facilitating resistance surveillance in countries with high levels of malaria endemicity.
Figure 1 from Pholwat et al., Antimicrobial Agents Chemother. 2017
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