Now, just minutes to detect malaria

A device, which can detect malaria within minutes, has been created by scientists from Glasgow University.

As for how it works, blood samples are placed in the microchip, which is designed to detect the strain of disease.

Project leader Dr Lisa Ranford-Cartwright said: “The current way of diagnosing is using a blood smear on a slide and examining it on a microscope.

“That will take a good microscopist a good hour to reach a diagnosis, it’s extremely difficult to make that diagnosis accurately.

“The chip can give us a result in as little as half an hour.”

Dr Heather Ferguson, a malaria researcher, picked up the disease in southern Kenya and it was only spotted by chance when she was giving a blood sample, reports The BBC.

She said: “Had I not been diagnosed at that moment and caught it within the next 24 hours all those millions of parasites would have replicated one more time, making eight times as many as there had been before, which could very easily have been lethal.”