Kyasanur Forest Disease 

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• Recently, researchers found a new point-of-care test to be highly sensitive for rapid diagnosis of Kyasanur forest disease (KFD) which is emerging as a new public health problem & challenge in India.

• Kyasanur Forest Disease is tick-borne viral hemorrhagic fever which is endemic to Southwestern part of India. It is caused by a virus from the family Flaviviridae.

About Point-of-care tests:

• It is developed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)-National Institute of Virology.

• It includes a battery-operated Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) analyzer, which is a portable, lightweight and universal cartridge-based sample pre-treatment kit and nucleic acid extraction device that aid in sample processing at the point of care.