Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina announce that they have just developed a blood test, which is 90% reliable, that can determine whether a patient’s infection is viral or bacterial.
Until now, the existing tests required to wait several days for the results to be obtained, which is moreover not always very reliable. While this new test, developed by the team of Dr. Geoffrey Ginsburg, professor at the School of Medicine at Duke University, allows results to be obtained in 12 hours. A sufficiently short period so that general practitioners no longer hesitate to wait for the results before deciding whether or not to prescribe antibiotics.
During winter epidemics, it is not uncommon to prescribe antibiotics to a patient who looks really bad when his infection is only viral. However, health authorities keep repeating it, antibiotics are only effective in the treatment of bacterial infections and are useless in viral infections. However, a recent report from the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM) indicates that for the past five years, the consumption of antibiotics has been on the rise again, increasing by 3% whereas it had fallen by 10% at the start of the years. 2000s. This increase in prescriptions is far from reassuring in a context where antibiotic resistance has become a real public health problem in France like in the United States.
Little by little, bacteria have developed defense strategies against these antibiotics. They mutate to camouflage themselves, modify their walls so that antibiotics no longer have a hold on them, or even produce enzymes that destroy drugs outright. Hence the interest of this new test which manages to read the genetic signature of the main viruses. “In the last test to date, we tested it on 102 patients who presented to the Emergency Department with a symptom of fever. The test correctly identified which viral infection it was 89% of the time and correctly identified bacterial infections 94% of the time. “
