Let us support fever test initiative to save our children from needless death

Each year, countless numbers of children in Kenya and across Africa are brought into clinics and hospitals with fevers.

These children could be suffering from deadly diseases such as malaria, pneumonia or meningitis.

Yet, it is difficult for doctors to identify the disease causing the fever without the right tools and equipment.

I have seen this problem since my early days as a medical student and intern.

Because tests to diagnose children were scarce, we had to rely on our best guess to determine what was causing the fever.

We oftentimes missed the diagnosis and could not provide the right treatment needed to save a child’s life.

Two decades later, doctors still do not have the tests we need to quickly and accurately diagnose multiple diseases that cause fever.

While there has been some progress with tests that diagnose malaria and HIV/Aids, when these tests come back negative, we have few options to figure out what other illness the child might have.

The result is that far too many children in Kenya and other African countries continue to suffer unnecessarily each year due to the misdiagnosis of fever, which contributes to the deaths of nearly 3 million children of less than five years of age from malaria and pneumon

The first step to the right treatment is the right test. Doctors and other health care workers desperately need a test that can quickly and accurately identify and distinguish between fever-causing diseases.

A novel device like this would be revolutionary. It would enable us to provide children with proper drugs, ensure we are not wasting resources on inappropriate treatments, and, in many cases, it could be the difference between life and death.

It is heartening that an innovative organisation is working to promote the development of such a test.

BIO Ventures for Global Health has designed a competition that would award cash prizes to companies that successfully develop this test.

The Global Health Innovation Quotient Prize, or IQ Prize, requires companies to design a test that is durable enough to work in settings that might not have electricity and clean water.

It would be low-cost, portable, and simple to use — and would need to work just as well for a child at a hospital in Nairobi as a child presenting in a rural clinic in the remote arid regions of northern Kenya.

There are many reasons to be excited about a test that could reliably diagnose various causes of fever.

Most notably, it could save up to 220,000 children’s lives each year in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and up to 350,000 lives worldwide.

This groundbreaking new test would also help doctors avoid giving the wrong medications to children.