This $25 Blood Test Can Tell Every Virus You've Ever Had
It turns out that most people have been exposed to about 10 different species of virus, including ones that cause colds, flu, and gastrointestinal illnesses. (Photo: Getty Images)
It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie: Scientists have developed a new blood test that can tell nearly every virus you’ve ever been exposed to.
Even better — it only takes a drop of your blood to do it.
The test, dubbed VirScan, and research surrounding it is the subject of a new report published in the journal Science. For the study, scientists screened sera, a part of the blood, from 569 people in the U.S., South Africa, Thailand, and Peru and tested for more than 200 types of viruses.
Not only did the test (which is still in the experimental stage) work, researchers discovered that most people were exposed to about 10 different species of virus, including ones that cause colds, flu, and gastrointestinal illnesses. (A few subjects were exposed to as many as 25 virus species.)
The findings are important on many levels, board-certified infectious disease specialist Amesh A. Adalja, MD, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center tells Yahoo Health.
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On a patient level, it can give doctors your viral medical history quickly and easily. The current method for detecting whether a person has had a virus is by testing for one virus at a time, Adalja explains. So, for example, if your doctor wanted to know if you’ve ever had the chicken pox, you might be sent to a lab to have blood drawn to test for that particular virus. If your doctor wasn’t sure if you’d ever had another virus, you’d get a separate blood test.
This new test, which costs about $25 to perform, will check for a host of viruses at once, saving time, money, and — patients will be happy to know — blood drawn.
The test could also help determine whether you’ve developed immunity to a particular virus, says Adalja, which would clue your doctor in on whether you’d need to have an additional vaccine to safeguard against that virus.
And, on a personal level, it could help you make an educated decision on whether you would want to get a particular vaccine. If you’ve definitively contracted the flu every year, for example, as opposed to thinking maybe you had it, you’d probably be more likely to sign up for an annual flu shot going forward.
“This is giving the whole viral history of a person,” Adalja says. “It’s one blood test and 200 pathogens…the development will be enormous.”
Adalja is also excited about the impact it may have on public health: “This test can help us understand the pattern of a disease, knowing what it did in the past.” Understanding how a virus spread before can help scientists better prevent the spread of it in the future, he explains.
For example, if a respiratory virus spread in a particular city, the blood test could help epidemiologists easily look back to determine what age group it hit the hardest in the past and at what time of year it happened to better predict how the virus will behave in the future. “We can do that now, but this makes the economy of scale much higher, allowing this to be done in a much easier fashion,” says Adalja. It can also help better determine which age is best for children to receive particular vaccines.
While Adalja says this currently has the biggest implications for research, he predicts it may eventually become a normal part of going to the doctor’s office. “It could be part of your regular physical so that doctors have a whole viral history of you,” he says. “It’s definitely the way of the future.”
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