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Israel, known as the ‘start-up nation’ has found a solution and alternative to throat and nose swabbing test for the coronavirus disease. A one-minute breathalyser is currently in test to tell whether someone has coronavirus could soon be installed at hundreds of global entry points if it gets approval from the US Food and Drug Administration.
The clever contraption, which uses frequency to detect the deadly SARS-CoV-2, was designed by a team based at an Israeli university and has a success rate of more than 90 percent in trials to-date.
Current tests for the new coronavirus use throat or nose swabs and look for particles but the team led by Professor Gabby Sarusi at University of the Negev thought outside the box in terms of detection.
Sarusi’s team has been working with Israel’s Defence Ministry to validate the hand-held device which contains a chip with densely packed sensors to capture tiny particles from the breath, including any viruses.
The chip is then read through a THz spectroscopy, which takes about 20 seconds. Scientists look for the tell-tale changes in resonance in the THz spectral range caused by the coronavirus. Within a minute they can tell if someone is carrying the virus, even though they may be completely without symptoms.
Sarusi hopefully expects to manufacture the first batch by September or October this year.
“After the individual breaths into the breathalyser, the species in his mouth, including the viruses, attach to devices on this chip, we close the capsule that contains the chip and then we transfer it to the spectrometer. And then we scan it for about 20 seconds and then we have about 2 seconds of mathematical processing, and eventually we can say whether we have a corona carrier or don’t have a corona carrier,” explained Sarusi on how the the one-minute breath test will process.
Sarusi’s team has been working with Israel’s Defence Ministry to validate the hand-held device which contains a chip with densely packed sensors to capture tiny particles from the breath, including any viruses.
The chip is then read through a THz spectroscopy, which takes about 20 seconds. Scientists look for the tell-tale changes in resonance in the THz spectral range caused by the coronavirus. Within a minute they can tell if someone is carrying the virus, even though they may be completely without symptoms.
“This eventually will be fulfilled at points of entries namely, airports, cruise ships, companies… So we are going to position in those point of entries many many machines. Each machine will have a throughput of about 4,000 people a day,” he added.
Source: The Australian Jewish News
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