WINTER 2014
In partnership with the Vietnam National
Tuberculosis Program and the University of
California, San Francisco, Fletcher’s group
deployed 15 CellScopes for a full year, to
evaluate their uptake and ability to detect TB
at health care facilities with little medical or
IT infrastructure. The Hanoi Province pilots
showed that community health care workers
were able to operate the CellScope and that
disease diagnosis met the standard quality
available at major Vietnamese hospitals. This
work motivated development of a second
generation device that is being tested in
Hanoi.
Recently, another CellScope device was
field-tested in Cameroon where the Gates
Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes
of Health had been struggling to find a
way to restart mass drug administration
programs to fight the roundworms that cause
river blindness and lymphatic filariasis.
The problem health workers faced was
that patients were at risk of serious health
complications, including death, if they were
given river blindness medication while coinfected with the Loa loa worm. But to test
for Loa loa, health workers needed to draw
several millilite