Agence France Presse

Singapore, April 10:

A drop of blood is all that doctors will need to check for nose cancer with a Singapore-made detection kit that will be sold globally, media reports said today. The kit will make it possible to obtain a diagnosis within a few hours by adding several chemicals to the blood and placing the mixture into a special machine, the Straits Times said.

The test, which will cost about $18, is just as accurate but simpler and faster than the traditional blood test, which takes several days and requires an expert technician to culture the blood cells, process them and read the results. However, it is still not as thorough as a nasal endoscope, where a specialist inserts a flexible scope into a patient’s nasal passage. “The gold standard for diagnosis is the nasal endoscope, but this is limited to specialists who have the equipment and expertise,” the paper quoted ear and nose specialist Goh Yau Hong as saying.