News

On Oct. 16, when a nurse from a Texas hospital took to the national media to decry unsafe conditions for workers exposed to the Ebola virus, the echoes carried all the way to Baltimore, to ethics professor Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN, and, she hopes, to the student nurses making their way toward tomorrow’s front lines.

Disease outbreaks and catastrophes can affect countries at any time, causing substantial human suffering and deaths and economic losses. If health systems are ill-equipped to deal with such situations, the affected populations can be very vulnerable.

Diagnosing HIV and other infectious diseases presents unique challenges in remote locations that lack electric power, refrigeration, and appropriately trained healthcare staff. To address these issues, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed a low-cost, electricity-free device capable of detecting the DNA of infectious pathogens, including HIV-1. The device uses a small scale chemical reaction, rather than electric power, to provide the heat needed to amplify and detect the DNA or RNA of pathogens present in blood samples obtained from potentially infected individuals.