Blood Test Tries to Detect Flu Before a Fever

Blood Test Tries to Detect Flu Before a Fever

Duke University is Trying Blood Tests to Detect the Flu Before Symptoms Appear
Coughed on by somebody with the flu? Duke University researchers are developing a test to determine — with a mere drop of blood — who will get sick before the sniffling and fever set in. And they're turning to hundreds of dorm-dwelling freshmen this fall to see if it works.

It's a novel experiment: Students report daily whether they have any cold or flu symptoms. If they do, a team swoops in to test not just the sneezer but, more importantly, seemingly healthy friends and hallmates who might be incubating the infection.

"We're redefining the definition of being ill," says Col. Geoffrey Ling, a physician with the Defense Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department's research arm, which came up with the idea.

The reason: The military faces huge problems when flu or other viruses sweep through crowded barracks, and knowing an outbreak was brewing could allow them to separate and protect those not infected. We're not just talking about the challenge of replacing fevered soldiers on the day's patrol. Your body may be slowing down even before that fever erupts, as it tries to fight off a brewing virus.

And flu is con***ious up to 24 hours before people show symptoms, one of the insidious ways that it spreads.

"If you've got a group of people living together and you can identify who's likely to become sick, you can much more efficiently use whatever your intervention is — a vaccine, an antiviral — to prevent disease," explains Duke infectious disease specialist Dr. Christopher Woods.
Respiratory viruses sweep through crowded college dorms just as easily as military squads, and with the new swine flu — the 2009 H1N1 strain — targeting mostly the young, Duke scientists may learn sooner than they had hoped just how well their experimental test really works.

It's ****d on a simple principle: Your immune system revs up to fight infection long before you show symptoms or before today's tests could detect the actual virus in your body. The Duke team discovered a so-called genomic fingerprint, a pattern of subtle molecular changes as genes are activated to fight viral respiratory infections.