“In New York City, we’ve seen plenty of patients with Chikungunya, mainly because we have a lot of travelers from the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic,” he said in an interview. “Therefore, this test should be of interest to infectious diseases specialists and emergency room physicians.”

Dr. Caplivski noted that physicians currently use a serologic test to diagnose CHIKV, but results “generally come back five to seven days later, so it would be interesting to have an answer right away.”

Dr. Christopher Ohl, an infectious diseases specialist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, commented, “With all of the attention now being focused on Zika infection, Chikungunya is not getting much attention even though it was recently responsible for a worldwide outbreak and millions of infections.”

“Chikungunya is still endemic in many tropical areas and is difficult to distinguish from Dengue Fever and Zika infection,” he told Reuters Health by email. “Thus, an accurate test that can be performed quickly in rural and resource-poor settings is quite welcome. This new RT-RPA test should prove to be useful in the evaluation of outbreaks due to mosquito-borne viruses.”

No funding was reported. One coauthor is an employee of GenExpress Gesellschaft fur Proteindesign and has a commercial interest in the molecular RNA standard.