In Africa, waiting for blood work can take weeks, and many people don't bother getting their results. A new device could make testing in remote villages a possibility, and that could lead to drastically improved treatment.

If you were concerned you had HIV (and lived in America), it would be easy enough to get some blood drawn at a clinic near your house, and wait a few days (or even hours) for the results. But in Africa, many clinics and hospitals have to send out blood samples to a national lab. It's a process that can take weeks, and patients in remote areas sometimes don't even bother to make the trek back to the clinic to get results. On a continent with a rampant HIV epidemic, this is a big problem. But Columbia University researchers have a partial solution--a $1 plastic chip that can diagnose HIV and syphilis in 15 minutes.

The "mChip", a credit-card-sized piece of plastic that is produced using a plastic injection molding process, tests for multiple diseases with just one pinprick of blood. There are no moving parts, and the microfluidics-based chip can be analyzed with help from a cheap optical sensor.

According to results published this week in Nature Medicine, the chip detects 100% of cases when used to test HIV or syphilis and HIV together, with a 4% to 6% false positive rate. That's similar to what is seen with standard lab tests in the developed world.

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