tashawook

Hi there. I work in a Pediatric emergency department in the public sector in South Africa and this type of test would be extremely useful in our context. One of the biggest diagnostic challenges for us is differentiating febrile seizures from possible meningitis as our lumbar puncture results have a turn around time of about 24 hours. This leads to unnecessary admissions and iv antibiotic use. My question is therefore, world this test be applicable to cns infections and how long until this test could be rolled out globally?

Nope. The lab in our hospital doesn't do microscopy or even csf chemistry so our samples get sent to a different hospital. We sometimes use a urine dipstick on the csf to quickly check if there are white cells...