Essential Healthcare for HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria
The Partec Company's Essential Healthcare division is contributing to addressing the specific requirements of patients by developing, manufacturing, and supplying innovative, dedicated, accurate, affordable mobile solutions to where they are needed most for improving human healthcare services.
Resource-poor and developing countries are suffering most from the three global diseases HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria - this includes a disastrous impact on humanitarian, social, and economic aspects. Life expectancy in some countries has decreased to less than 35 years. Independent from social level, all families from workers to their governmental leaders are now affected by HIV/AIDS. After more than 20 years of AIDS, despite the increasingly available funds, the vast majority of individuals urgently requiring controlled antiretroviral treatment are still not being covered by the necessary health services. Although now antiretroviral drugs and suitable malaria medicines have become widely available, the main bottleneck is the lack in dedicated affordable, robust, and easy-to-use diagnostic equipment and reliable protocols.
A high percentage of HIV/AIDS patients suffer from coinfections with tuberculosis, malaria, and other infectious diseases. In addition, treatment of acute malaria cases with erythrocyte support represents a serious risk of transmitting the HIV virus. In order to serve patients in the most effective way, management of the three major diseases must be combined. This requires dedicated and suitable diagnostic tools which are specifically adapted to the situation in low- and mid-income countries and in resource-poor settings which previously have not been covered due to complexity and high cost of conventional equipment.
The Partec Essential Healthcare division develops, manufactures and distributes dedicated diagnostic solutions in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. The CyFlow® technique has provided the world with the first mobile/portable flow cytometry instrument, introduced in order to serve the rapidly growing demand of low- and mid-income countries for robust, easy-to-operate, accurate and affordable instrumentation for HIV monitoring and AIDS patient follow-up. Since the end of 2002, more than 500 CyFlow® units have been successfully implemented worldwide, including in 40 African and 15 Asian countries, for CD4 and CD4% counting within national treatment programmes and NGO projects. In 2006, 1.1 million of Partec patient tests were used which is equivalent to covering 275,000 patients. Since end of 2006 the CyScope®, an ultracompact and battery-operated fluorescence microscope, has been available for easy-to-perform and affordable high-sensitivity detection of TB and malaria.
Partec Founder Wolfgang Göhde travelled in Africa to understand unmet healthcare needs, and to develop ideas for potential solutions. In the video below, he discusses his findings. (2005)
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