Prompt and accurate diagnosis and effective treatment are the corner stones of effective malaria disease management. The clinical diagnosis is not always very easy, as the primary symptoms may resemble those of other diseases (like the flu). Therefore, laboratory diagnosis is also very important and this has up to now relied almost exclusively on microscopy.

Microscopy
This is a valuable technique when done properly, but unreliable when poorly performed. As the detection limit of microscopy is + 20 parasites/µl of blood, a substantial number of patients with low numbers of parasites may be missed using this technique. Furthermore, microscopy is time consuming and labour intensive (an experienced technician may need 30 – 60 minutes to examine a blood slide).

Alternative tests
Alternative test are becoming available that may be helpful in the diagnosis of malaria. So-called rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) have been developed that allow for the detection of the parasites within minutes. A problem with these tests is that they may remain positive even after successful treatment for sometime. Furthermore, RDTs may also not detect low numbers of Plasmodium. Molecular tests, like quantitative nucleic acid sequence based amplification (QT-NASBA) which was developed by KIT Biomedical Research, are much more sensitive (100x more than microscopy) and allow for the quantification of parasites.