Trevor Thompson is a PhD graduate of the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine interested in strategies for interrupting transmission of vector-borne diseases like malaria. He recently published a paper entitled “Template copy number and the sensitivity of quantitative PCR for Plasmodium falciparum in asymptomatic individuals” in Malaria Journal based on his doctoral research at the Tropical Medicine Department of Tulane SPHTM and an NIH Fogarty Global Health Fellowship at the University of Bamako in Mali (West Africa). This research was based on the West African International Center of Excellence in Malaria Research (2010-2016) led by the late Professor Donald Krogstad, MD, and evaluated laboratory tests for detecting malaria infection to interrupt transmission.
Asymptomatic individuals infected with Plasmodium falciparum harbor a substantial fraction of parasites in the community and can contribute to malaria transmission. However, those individuals do not seek care because they do not have signs or symptoms of malaria and are often missed by conventional diagnostic methods due to limited sensitivities. Because laboratory tests offer greater sensitivity, this research evaluated the potential of these tests to detect P. falciparum in asymptomatic children whose infections were confirmed by microscopic examination. The results showed the most sensitive tests missed more than half of infections at low parasite densities. Because asymptomatic, infected individuals typically have low parasite densities, those results suggest the laboratory tests examined are not sufficiently sensitive for identifying these individuals to interrupt transmission and progress toward malaria elimination.
You can find the full study here: https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12936-020-03365-8.
