PointCare Technologies, pioneer inventor of a portable diagnostic system that enables effective HIV/AIDS monitoring for millions of people in remote areas of developing countries, has donated 4,000 (a month's supply) of its rapid PointCare NOW tests to Haitian clinics to ensure the resumption of critical care to HIV/AIDS patients. The test delivers two categories of diagnostic results simultaneously: CD4 absolute count and CD4%, combined with hematology profiling for HIV monitoring and as an aid in diagnosing infection and active tuberculosis. The test runs on the company's FDA-cleared, portable PointCare NOW instrument, which operates on battery power, requires no refrigeration of reagents, and enables rapid, sophisticated field testing. In order to help address the vast need for critical emergency care following the earthquake, the company also included in the donation 4,000 rapid hematology tests to be used on its PointCare NOW instrument.
"Since 2006, our PointCare NOW systems have been used successfully in Haiti to initiate and monitor anti-retroviral therapy (ART) for thousands of HIV/AIDS patients – we've had systems in 22 individual clinics, most of them in the greater Point-au-Prince area," said Michael Cohen, senior advisor to the PointCare chairman. "We're a very small company with limited resources, but when we heard from the people on the ground in Haiti that they couldn't resume patient care because supply was not getting through, we loaded up two pallets of test kits, and sent them off to our Haitian distributor, Reinbold Import & Export, who has delivered them to clinics free of charge."