NEW YORK, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have developed a tool for pathogen identification -- the first such tool that provides a differential diagnosis of infectious diseases.
Researchers in the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and their colleagues in the World Health Organization's Global Laboratory Network created the pathogen surveillance and discovery tool that's called the GreeneChip System.
The scientists say the tool provides comprehensive, differential diagnosis of infectious diseases, including those caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi or parasites. In addition, it's the first tool that can be used on a wide variety of samples, including tissue, blood, urine and stool. That allows for the rapid identification of pathogens in a variety of laboratory and clinical settings.
The GreeneChip system and its application in an outbreak investigation when other methods failed to implicate a micro-organism in a fatal hemorrhagic fever case is described in the January issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and online at cdc.gov/EID/13/1/06-0837.htm.
