Doctors and other medical experts are constantly looking for cheap yet reliable tests, so they may accurately assess their patients' respective conditions. However, in spite of their efforts, these tests still remain either massively expensive or unfairly unavailable. Now a new blood test can help change all of this.
This blood test can help tell whether a virus or a bacterial infection causes an infection. A report from News Max also states that this type of test can prevent the unneeded, and potentially dangerous, prescription of antibiotics to patients. This new test works by identifying seven types of genes in the human body whose behavioral patter changes during either a viral or a bacterial infection.
"A lot of times you can't really tell what kind of infection someone has," says the lead author of the study, Timothy Sweeney, an engineering research associate with the Stanford Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection. "If someone comes into the clinic, a bacterial or a viral infection often looks exactly the same," he says. This works much better than the current method of trying to find the pathogens in a person's blood as many of the cases are not bloodstream infections. This test can find the infection and its cause anywhere within the body.
Although initial tests have proven to be highly effective, there are two obstacles this new blood test must first overcome before it is made available for general use. According to Drug Discovery and Development Magazine, these two hurdles are: first being tested thoroughly in a clinical setting and the next one is combining an 11-gene test, which would make it even more effective compared to how it is currently. With this type of drug test, if ever it is approved for use, will undoubtedly help save countless people's lives simply by preventing the spread of their disease before it could get much worse.
