Diagnosis of Infectious Diseases: Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV and Aids – A Review

Achieving and sustaining global healthcare is one of the challenges of our time. Healthcare entails sensitive and competent diagnosis of pathogens, treatment and prevention. Infectious diseases have claimed millions of lives and escalated poverty conditions especially in developing regions. Hence, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) between the years 2000 and 2015 included healthcare: the eradication of infectious diseases and rehabilitating societal damages triggered by the diseases. Great efforts have been taken towards this goal; evident by the decline in the statistics of global malaria, human immune deficiency virus (HIV) infections and mortality cases recorded at the end of the MDGs era. However, current infectious diseases statistics from resource-constrained regions are still a sore point. Africa and South East Asia recorded the highest number of both new infections and death cases worldwide. Science and technology face the challenge of producing Point of Care Testing (POCT) devices suitable for such regions to achieve efficient detection of diseases across the global spectrum. This paper reviews traditional and new techniques used for the detection of some infectious diseases: malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. The drawbacks of these techniques are discussed and solutions such as Plasmonic metal-based immuno chemical biosensors are considered. For example, vibrational spectroscopy (Raman), which has a potential for the detection and identification of infectious diseases using traditionally weaker intrinsic Raman signals can be improved by the inclusion of the Plasmonic metals, a phenomenon called Surface Enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). Hence, with innumerable references, this paper also reviews SERS application in biosensing and synergising with new technologies such as microfluidics.

Keywords: POCT; TB; malaria; HIV; SERS; Diagnosis