A discovery by Australian scientists may lead to easier and earlier malaria detection by way of a breath test, rather than a blood test.
The CSIRO and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute have discovered people with a malaria infection have higher levels of a smelly sulphur-based chemical on their breath.
CSIRO research group leader Dr Stephen Trowell said when the infection is treated, the chemical drops back to a low level.
He said the discovery could eventually lead to traditional blood tests for malaria being replaced by breath tests.
“What is exciting is that the increase in these chemicals were present at very early stages of infection, when many other methods would have been unable to detect the parasite in the body of people infected with malaria,” Dr Trowell said.
“In addition to its potentially better sensitivity, human breath offers an attractive alternative to blood tests for diagnosing malaria.”
At the moment most malaria diagnosis is done by putting a blood sample under a powerful microscope and having an expert look at is.
More than 200 million of the tests are done every year, but even these are not available everywhere in the world.
The study, published today in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, was conducted in two independent studies where experimental drug treatments were being tested in volunteers who had been given a very small dose of infection.
QIMR Berghofer senior scientist in clinical tropical medicine Professor James McCarthy said the researchers, using a sophisticated analytical instrument, identified four sulphur-containing compounds whose levels varied across the time course of the malaria infection
“The sulphur-containing chemicals had not previously been associated with any disease and their concentrations changed in a consistent pattern over the course of the malaria infection,” Professor McCarthy said.
“Their levels were correlated with the severity of the infection and effectively disappeared after they were cured.”
Up to now, these chemicals have only been detected using very expensive, laboratory based instruments, and only in the breath of volunteers experiencing a controlled malaria infection in the clinic.
In 2013, according to the WHO, there were almost 200 million cases and over half a million deaths due to malaria.