Comparative Assessment of Diagnostic Performance of Urine Malaria Test Strip Against Rapid Diagnostic Tests Kit in Febrile Children Attending General Hospital Mahuta, Kebbi State, Nigeria

Abstract

Malaria caused by species of plasmodium, is transmitted to humans by infected anopheles mosquitoes. There have been around 627,000 deaths of  malaria worldwide, 78% of deaths in children under the age of 5, which has led to a large number of death (> 90%) in sub -Saharan Africa. Precise and  rapid diagnosis is one of the important steps to reduce the incidence and mortality of malaria. Rapid diagnostic test (RDT) of malaria in blood is currently  used, but other specific diagnostic test kits using body fluid have been developed. This study was carried out to assess the performance of one-step Urine  Malaria Test™ (UMT) against RDT in the detection of a poly-histidine antigen (HRP2) in the urine samples of thermal and febrile patients for the  diagnosis of malaria. Blood and urine samples were collected from 100 suspected malaria patients of which 85 were malaria blood smear positive cases  (test samples) and 15 malaria negative cases (controls). The urine and blood samples of each patient were evaluated for rapid UMT and RDT. Using  microscopy as gold standard, the sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) of the UMT rapid  malaria test for urine and RDT for blood were calculated. The accuracy of RDT rapid malaria test for malarial parasite detection was 95% for blood and 84 % for UMT. Rapid malaria test processed with urine may be a useful non-invasive and cost effective malaria diagnostic technique in the nearest future.