Malaria diagnosis in private laboratories of Surat city: a laboratory based study

Key words Malaria – microscopy – mixed infection – P. falciparum – P. vivax – QBC dipstick Malaria still remains as one of the greatest challenges of public health. Nearly two million people die of ma-laria annually around the globe; at least one death oc-curs every 20 sec and another 200–500 million fall ill from it often severely1. In India the incidence of ma-laria has stabilised to around two million cases during the last decade2,3. Surat city is known world over for its glorious trade and commerce activities. Because of the migratory popula-tion in this city, malaria continues to be a major public health problem. There are urban health centres equipped with laboratory services and mobile units, which are pro-viding free laboratory services to the community for the diagnosis of malaria. Apart from the urban health cen-tres, there are private pathologists and self-employed technicians who are also providing laboratory services to the community. The present study was done during 1999–2000. Main aim of the study was to evaluate the technical skills of microscopists working under private pathologists, microbiologists and self-employed techni-cians in conventional microscopy and to know their knowledge about new methods in malaria diagnosis. Two set-ups were selected for this study — private laboratories owned by pathologists of Surat city; and self-employed technicians. Owners/Heads of 36 laboratories owned by patholo-gists and 36 laboratories owned by the self-employed technicians of Surat city were interviewed with the help of pre-designed questionnaire. Questions on use of new methods like dipstick/QBC for malaria diagnosis and malaria microscopy training/conferences attended by their microcopists, who were involved in malaria microscopy were included in the questionnaire. The microscopist, who was screening all PSMP (peripheral smear for malaria parasite) slides in the laboratory was shown three JSB/Giemsa stained slides selected ran-domly, diagnosed and confirmed by senior microsco-pists having more than 15 years of working experienc