The World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day 2024 serves as an opportunity to raise awareness to combat these diseases. altona offers a range of ready-to-use CE-marked test kits for the detection of different NTDs, namely the presence of chikungunya virus, dengue virus, and Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease.

To improve the diagnosis of infectious diseases, the University Hospital Essen is collaborating with Poltava State Medical University in Ukraine. altona was approached by the hospital in Essen and provides two AltoStar® automation systems complete with tool kits.

Beginning of November 2023, altona Diagnostics staged their first Health Day in cooperation with German health insurance company BARMER. Around 85 altona employees benefitted from a health check.

December 1 is World AIDS Day. AIDS is caused by the infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Today, viral replication can be suppressed by antiretroviral therapy (ART). With the AltoStar® HIV RT-PCR Kit 1.5, altona provides an CE-marked RT-PCR test to detect and quantify the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) specific RNA (groups M, N and O) in human EDTA plasma.

It’s World Pneumonia Day. Pneumonia is one of the leading infectious causes of death of children. To detect causative pathogens of pneumonia in children, altona supplies labs with real-time PCR assays.

The WHO has released its 2023 Essential Diagnostics List (EDL), a register of in vitro diagnostics (IVD), to support countries in making diagnostic decisions. Hepatitis E virus (HEV) has been added to this list, including a recommendation to use nucleic acid tests (NATs) like PCR assays to diagnose acute HEV infections. One of the mentioned PCR tests in the EDL is the altona RealStar® HEV RT-PCR assay.