Sharon Lewin
speaker
233 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2007
last heard Feb 2020
Sharon Lewin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Hi, Norman.
They're pretty good actually when we look at for the genetic code or use something called PCR to diagnose an infection.
Um, you can design the tools you use to detect the whole family of viruses or the specific
Wuhan coronavirus that we're talking about.
So they are pretty good, but every test is not perfect.
Some tests um diagnose a positive when you don't have the infection or miss an infection.
So we as it with new tests we take a while to understand how robust it really is.
But generally PCR based tests are highly specific and pretty accurate.
Actually we don't use the PCR based test for diagnosis.
No, we we largely use antibody tests showing that your body's made a reaction and that has an extremely high when we look at testing, we look at two things sensitivity and specificity.
Sensitivity determines how many positives you identify when someone has it and specificity says how often you might make a mistake or
diagnose someone with it when you don't have the actual infection.
So we use an antibody test
for diagnosis, but we do use PCR tests to track um how people do on treatment.
And we do use PCR based tests for very early diagnosis, which we want to know when we're saying screening the blood supply for HIV.
So we don't we use these PCR based at the moment we don't have a blood based antibody test showing you've been exposed to the end coronavirus the new coronavirus.
So that's
why we're using PCR.
Yeah, growing the virus um opens a whole range of new um tools allowing you to develop better diagnostics, antivirals, and vaccines.
And the key thing is that once you can grow the virus in the laboratory, you can test the efficacy of different drugs and whether they inhibit growth.
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