Team:Amplino/Problem

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Revision as of 15:24, 20 October 2012

Challenge

Every year 300 million people get infected with malaria, and 1 million die because of it. One of the challenges in dealing with malaria lies in diagnostics. Malaria is prevalent in developing countries in which there are not nearly enough tests, WHO states there is a need for 1.6 billion tests annually to deal with the disease, but only 16 million are delivered. On top of that the available tests don’t work in a number of cases. For instance, in pregnant women, concentration of parasites is too low to detect with traditional diagnostic tools, ultimately resulting in many deaths every year.

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 ==Challenge==
-In developing countries it is very hard to diagnose malaria in pregnant women; this results in premature births, miscarriages and even death of the mother and unborn child. 200.000 newborns die each year because of malaria. Microscopy and antibody-based tests on blood drops are used in rural areas to determine infection, but malaria in pregnant women evades these diagnostic tools. The parasites reside in the placenta and as a consequence blood in the rest of the body contains very few parasites when infected, making it impossible to find them.
+<html>
+<img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3ufaStTyrOk/T_ZZEqQFKaI/AAAAAAAAAjY/_QS2jqVu5ic/s1600/pregnant_woman.jpg" width=250 align=right />
+</html>
+Every year 300 million people get infected with malaria, and 1 million die because of it. One of the
+challenges in dealing with malaria lies in diagnostics. Malaria is prevalent in developing countries in
+which there are not nearly enough tests, WHO states there is a need for 1.6 billion tests annually to
+deal with the disease, but only 16 million are delivered. On top of that the available tests don’t work
+in a number of cases. For instance, in pregnant women, concentration of parasites is too low to
+detect with traditional diagnostic tools, ultimately resulting in many deaths every year.