WESTPORT, Apr 19 (Reuters Health) - Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have developed an inexpensive, portable instrument, the Advanced Nucleic Acid Analyzer, which they say can be used by epidemiologists in the field for the rapid detection of infectious agents. Dr. Philip Belgrader and colleagues describe the device in the Techview column of the April 16th issue of the journal Science. "Identifying, monitoring, and isolating the source of an outbreak of infectious disease can sometimes be difficult," they write.

"The process would be greatly facilitated by a portable instrument that could be used in any suspect location and was capable of rapidly detecting and characterizing microbial pathogens."