Photo: Quartz Africa

by AUVSI News 

Malawi has one of the highest rates of HIV prevalence in the world, and among many of those infected are children. In 2014, 130,000 youth were tested, yet only half were being treated. That same year, 10,000 children died from HIV-related diseases. Now, a drone programmed to go back and forth between hospital labs and rural health clinics in Malawi could drastically cut down on the cost and waiting time of testing African children for HIV. 

UNICEF and the Malawi government have launched a pilot program to test whether unmanned aircraft can help families test their children sooner. According to UNICEF, Malawi babies born to HIV-positive mothers must undergo specialized test that only eight labs in the country have the facilities to analyze, and getting the results of those test can take almost 10 weeks. This is a problem for infected infants who stand a much higher chance of surviving if they are treated with antiretroviral therapy as soon as possible. Those two months could be reduced to days with the help of drone delivery. 

“What we’re hoping is that when you get leapfrog technology like this, it can catalyze the whole system,” chief of communication for UNICEF in Malawi Angela Travis told Quartz. According to Travis, the main goal of the pilot is to see how the cost of using drones compares to traditional delivery methods. The current method requires fuel and drivers, while the drone’s main costs are electricity for charging its battery and the hardware. 

The pilot program will last through the end of the week, with delivery drones traveling between hospitals and villages in the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital, in different weather conditions and at different times of day. 

March 14, the drones successfully completed a 10-kilometer (six mile) route, carrying simulated HIV tests to Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe in 20 minutes. A slot in the center of the drone carried the dried blood samples, which are not infectious.

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