3 ms·
To be fair, lab testing can take a day or more, if you need to include an antibiotics screen, even more. Sometimes an infection can get very severe in this time
by folli 5y ago
To be fair, lab testing can take a day or more, if you need to include an antibiotics screen, even more. Sometimes an infection can get very severe in this time span, so sometimes antibiotics are given prophylactically without waiting for the results to come back.
I hope the massive advances of sequencing will reach the clinics soon, it should be possible to get the genome of the infectious bacteria/virus in a couple of hours with today's tech. You can even infer the antibiotic resistance from this info, so you'd know how to treat the infection in a very targeted fashion.
- andai 5y ago>I hope the massive advances of sequencing will reach the clinics soon What are the obstacles to this? I have been seeing articles lately about sequencing your own DNA at home in a few hours for about a thousand bucks. I guess the medical grade equipment has to be a lot more robust, so a lot more expensive? (And there might be an insufficient supply of biology interns to operate the equipment.)