9 March 2022 (Wednesday) - Why Microscope?

I’ve known for some time that the reason why a vaccine against malaria is rather tricky to make is because the parasites are constantly changing their antigenic make-up.
However I’ve always found it rather tedious that despite having a really easy-to-perform lateral flow test for malaria we still have to fiddle about making and examining blood films when testing for the parasites.
The reason we do this is exactly the same as the reason why the vaccine manufacturers are struggling,

Ironically we can do this here in the UK (relatively) easily, but microscopes are nowhere near as commonplace in the parts of the world where malaria is prevalent, as Clare tells us today.