Performance of Rapid Diagnostic Test for Malaria Diagnosis at the Different Specialized Hospitals in Wad Medani, Gezira State, Sudan

Background: Malaria may be overestimated if the diagnosis is based solely on clinical signs. Therefore, laboratory confirmation is essential. Rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) have become an essential tool in malaria control and management programmes in the world. RDTs can offer a good alternative with the advantage that it is an easy and rapid method, and may assist in diagnosis and improving the practices prescription. This study aims to evaluate the performance of RDTs for malaria diagnosis.

Methods: In Wad Medani, Central Sudan. 931 patients with symptoms of malaria attended the outpatient clinics at the different specialized hospitals were enrolled in this study, RDT and blood smears methods were performed to diagnose Plasmodium falciparum malaria and blood drop spot were collected in filter paper for nested PCR technique as a confirmative diagnostic tool.

Results: The results obtained by this study revealed that, 131/931 (14.1%) and 63/931(6.7%) were positive when performed by microscopy and RDT respectively. While the result of the 131 microscopy positive samples showed that 63/131(47.3%) were positive by RDT and 68/131(52.7%) were negative. The 68 samples subjected to nested PCR, 6 samples gave an insufficient amount of DNA after extraction while all the 62 samples confirmed that they were infected with P. falciparum malaria, indicating that there is a significant difference between the rates of malaria cases diagnosed by microscopy and RDT (P = 0.001).

Conclusion: This study concluded that the implementation of RDT as a diagnostic tool could not be a merely an alternative method to diagnose malaria, and it does not replace malaria microscopy.