Australian scientists developed a blood test for African sleeping sickness, which doesn’t require expensive equipment. Best of all, they published the details of the test under a Creative Commons license, which means it’s free to all.

Zablon Njiru and Andrew Thompson of Murdoch University led a team that developed the elegantly simple way to check for trypanosomes — protozoan parasites that are sometimes carried by tsetse flies.To catch an infection in the earliest stages, when it is most treatable, technicians must look for a very small number of parasites in a sea of body fluids. That is not an easy thing to do, but there is a trick to make it easier: By mixing the liquid sample with a cocktail of molecules that can copy trypanosome DNA, they can make the serum resistance associated gene, a signpost of the disease, stand out — transforming each test into a manageable task.

Instead of using the polymerase chain reaction, which amplifies the microbe DNA with the aid of an expensive instrument called a thermocycler, the researchers employed another gene multiplying technique called loop-mediated isothermal amplification. It requires little more than a warm water bath and a few chemicals. After that procedure, which takes less than a half hour, the scientists can simply add some SYBR green dye and watch the brew change color if it contains a boatload of duplicated genetic material from the pathogen.

African Sleeping sickness is endemic in sub-Saharan Africa, a deadly disease that has resulted in past epidemics. While the number of infections have been dropping in recent years, there are still somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 currently infected. Who would have thought creative commons would have been able to help control the disease? Well, Njiru and Thompson I guess. Alright…pretty clever. Needless to say, it makes us even more eager to see what comes of  science commons.

via: Wired