By Nsikan Akpan
Magnets might soon reveal brewing malaria infections long before symptoms appear. In mice, magnetic sensors take mere minutes to spot otherwise imperceptible levels of the parasitic blood infection, scientists report August 31 in Nature Medicine.
“With malaria, a few days can be the difference between life and death,” says coauthor Peter Preiser, a parasitologist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “If confirmed in humans, our technique could detect disease roughly two to four days earlier.”