Blood test could gauge if a baby has a dangerous infection in 15 minutes — SkimNews
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- Tommaso Bellini at the Giannina Gaslini Institute in Genoa, Italy, tested blood from 85 infants younger than 90 days brought to ER with fever, correctly flagging all 15 bacterial infections, 44 viral infections, and 26 cases without infection; he presented the results at the European Emergency Medicine Congress in Paris.
- The test reads two proteins — CD64 (a bacterial marker) and CD169 (a viral marker) — on neutrophils and monocytes respectively, delivering results in 15 to 20 minutes in a lab setting.
- Only about 15% of febrile babies actually have a serious bacterial infection, per Bellini, yet existing tests take hours, driving precautionary antibiotic prescriptions that the source ties to rising antimicrobial resistance.
- Beckman Coulter Life Sciences has built a benchtop machine that reads those same markers from a finger-prick blood sample, approved for research use; Fabrice Malergue first demonstrated the CD64/CD169 approach's reliability in adult ER patients in 2021.
- Malergue's collaborator deployed the test during a Martinique dengue outbreak and discovered patients misdiagnosed with the usually-mild viral illness who in fact had leptospirosis — a life-threatening bacterial infection requiring antibiotics.
Why it matters: For the roughly 85% of febrile infants who do not have a serious bacterial infection, a 15-minute result could replace hours-long precautionary antibiotic courses — a practice the source identifies as a driver of antimicrobial resistance. Beckman Coulter's benchtop analyzer is already research-approved and a planned 300–500-infant trial is the next evidence step.
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