Challenge

Access to health care affects individuals and society in various ways and limited access to health care impacts people’s ability to reach their full potential, negatively influencing the quality of life. The major barriers concerned with access to health care include lack of availabilities, high cost and lack of insurance coverage. These limits would lead to the delays in receiving appropriate care, unmet health needs, inabilities to get preventive services, and hospitalization that could have been prevented. The access to health care could be affected in four different aspects: services, cost, timeliness and effect, which is also the critical factors for effective pathogen detection service.

Improving pathogen detection depends on ensuring that people have a usual and ongoing source of related care services, especially increasing the access to and use of evidence-based preventive services or facilities. Prevention of illness should be improved by detecting early warning signs or symptoms before they develop to serious disease because the detection of disease at early leads to effective and cost-effective treatment. Cost of health care directly affect the access to related services or facilities for the reason that people would be less likely to receive medical car and more likely to have poor health status if they could not afford the cost for health care. Lack of inexpensive pathogen detection services would make it difficult for people to get the health care and burden people with large medical bills. Timeliness is the ability of health care system to provide health care quickly, including the time for waiting for services or facilities and the time for detection or treatment. Prolonged time for detection of pathogen could decrease the satisfaction of patient, increase amount of patients who give up detection or treatment, and is closely related to the clinically significant delays in health care. The effect of health care is one of the most important concern about improving health care for the reason that results from the pathogen detection services could influence the treatment to the patients, the health quality of people and the reliability of health care system.

Access to health care system, especially the detection of pathogenic microorganism, is required to be improved for the problematic pathogen surveillance systems now. The existing methods for detecting pathogens in food and water control or clinical diagnosis include microorganism culturing for testing specific characteristic of morphology of colony and biochemical functions, mass spectrometry testing for specific proteins, polymerase chain reaction testing for specific DNA sequence. The traditional method for detecting pathogen is culturing which is sensitive and cost-effective but the period for testing takes days. The testing methods with molecular or biochemical strategies are efficient and fast but the facilities and service is not easily accessible and the cost is high.

Specific issues about improving pathogen detection that should be monitored include designing and constructing novel appropriate, safe, and effective pathogen detection methods, increasing the timeliness and convenience of using the new systems for detection of pathogen, improving the sensitivity and specificity of pathogen detection services, and decreasing the cost of pathogen detection.

Reference

[1] Lazcka O, Campo F, Munoz F X. Pathogen detection: a perspective of traditional methods and biosensors[J]. Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2007, 22(7): 1205-1217.

[2] Nassif X. A revolution in the identification of pathogens in clinical laboratories[J]. Clinical infectious diseases, 2009, 49(4): 552-553.