Malaria Control & Elimination

The use of theranostics has piqued the interest of modern scientists. In recent years, researchers have attempted to capitalise on theranostics' potential applications in a variety of fields. Theranostics is a broad field of science that seeks to develop complex diagnostic and therapeutic agents. It is also established that when these cutting-edge systems are combined into a single platform, they are capable of bridging the biodistribution and site specificity gap between imaging molecules and therapeutic agents. At the moment, theranostics uses nanotechnology to deliver active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) to absorption sites, resulting in increased bioavailability. In addition to the benefits mentioned above, theranostics have been proposed to be potentially effective in a variety of ailments, particularly cancer, malaria, microbial diseases, and cardiovascular diseases through the use of MNPs. Furthermore, theranostics are important in personalised medicine because they can be developed based on biomarker identification. Because of their versatility, MPNs are among the most promising diagnostic and therapeutic entities in modern medicine. Recently, there has been a significant increase in the biosynthesis of MNPs from medicinal plants, which is critical for the development of theranostics. Medicinal plants are a dependable and necessary source of natural bioactive compounds.

Background: Malaria is considered one of the highest killer diseases caused by a protozoan parasite of a severity of genus Plasmodium. The symptoms of malaria appear similarly with symptoms of other diseases and have posed a huge problem in terms of accurate and rapt diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to compare the sensitivity and specificity values of two diagnostic tools; malaria microscopy and rapid diagnostic test kits (using three different RDTs) in the diagnosis of malaria.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed on patients at the Holy Family Hospital at Berekum in the Bono East Region of Ghana. One hundred and fifty-five (155) participants were recruited. Their blood samples were taken. The participants were tested for malaria using the Histidine Rich Protein-2 (HRP-2) antigen based RDTs (Carestart, SD-Bioline and First Response) and malaria microscopy was also performed for all participants.

Results: All three RDTs had a 100% sensitivity value and a 98.5% specificity value. The reported positive predictive value and negative predictive values were 92.5% and 100% respectively for all RDTs. All three RDTs had a 95.4% agreement with microscopy.

Conclusion: The studies showed that malaria RDTs used in the region and microscopies were comparable in the diagnosis of malaria.