Emerging infectious diseases are abrupt threats that can be very severe to global health. It is sudden and most of the time the first of their kind, and in no time they tend to be highly uncontrolled. Most of the emerging diseases that have appeared after a long time remain of the highest concern. COVID-19.
For example, Zika virus, Nipah virus, and many other bacterial and viral infections are some of the most common, not only because of their high rate of transmission but also because of their evolving nature in the development of resistivity against the already existing treatments. There could not have been a time when the need for quick, accurate, and reliable diagnostic devices was greater.
Novel diagnostic approaches enable new devices today that diagnose and monitor these conditions and are at the forefront of fighting infectious diseases. This, therefore, places early diagnosis at a weighted point where health care providers have a chance to try and trace the spread of an infection by implementing inherently efficient control mechanisms. The paper will illustrate new trends in diagnostic technologies that are giving new hope to the future of infectious disease control.
Nanotechnology and Diagnostics
Nanotechnology has also been one of the most relevant fields in recent years for diagnosing and controlling re-emerging infectious diseases. For instance, magnetic nanosensors have been most promising in the detection of viruses and pathogens. Nanosensors take advantage of the specific characteristics conferred on the material properties of magnetic nanomaterials to help increase their sensitivity and specific percentages in diagnostic testing.
Further, several applications have been developed for magnetic nanosensors, including their detection performance in SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. Integration of magnetic nanosensing strategies with point-of-care diagnostic kits thus enabled the researcher to revise a device that is easy to use, portable, and yet capable of generating test results in an hour or less, even in resource-limited settings. Nanotechnology and its applications in developing biosensors proceed much faster, which shall not be discussed here in detail. Quantum dots have unconventional optical structures and have, therefore, greatly exploded in the development of biosensors.
It thus aids in the detection of even the smallest amount of nucleic acid, proteins, or other biomarkers that are indicators of infectious diseases. These nanomaterial-based diagnostics are one step further toward this aim, enabling the multiplexing detection or holding of multiplex testing for more than one target in just one single essay. This result will not only allow the medical practitioner to get better insight into a patient’s condition other than malaria but also treat the right patients accordingly. This would rather apply in the case of co-infections, whereby a number of pathogens can be involved. Another frontier in the diagnosis of emerging infectious diseases is the use of electrochemical biosensors, which has brought a considerable reduction in the complexity and cost of diagnostic tests, hence making the diagnosis of formidable infectious diseases amenable to wider use. Basically, electrochemical biosensors work through biochemical interactions between some target analytic and a sensor element that reduce an electrical signal.