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There is no vaccine. No medication. And, no quick, reliable test for Zika virus ... until now. Babies born with the virus often have lifelong, devastating birth defects. Testing for the virus currently involves trained medical staff drawing and mailing blood samples to a lab, a process that can take up to four weeks.
"Most adults with Zika have mild flu-like symptoms or no symptoms at all. Couples trying to conceive might not even know if they are infected and at risk," Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak urology scientist Laura Lamb, Ph.D., said.
Dr. Lamb and her Beaumont colleagues developed a quick, simple test for Zika virus so easy to administer, you don't even need a doctor. It's a urine test that produces results in under 30 minutes.
"When we discovered we could reliably detect Zika virus in urine, we knew we had the potential to change lives all over the world," Dr. Lamb said.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday May 17 2017, @04:26PM
MP23-03 urine based rapid molecular diagnosis of Zika virus [jurology.com]
RT-LAMP could specifically detect ZIKV in ZIKV positive samples. This could be done in under 30 minutes and did not require timely RNA extraction from the urine, unlike real time PCR.
The study is named "Detection of Zika Virus in Urine Samples and Infected Mosquitos by Reverse Transcription-Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification" and presented at the American Urological Association's annual meeting in Boston, USA. (src [beaumont.org])
The key seems to be "Reverse Transcription-Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification". Sounds PCR-ish.
Anyone knows more about this method?