Director of quality assurance and control at Pointcare Technologies Inc, Maurice Doire, explaining to Dr Nicholas Adomakoh how the AuRICA NOW portable CD4 and CD4 percentage testing device worked. Looking on is Vice President of Business Development at Pointcare, Dan O'Connor.

THE CARIBBEAN Cytometry and Analytical Society (CCAS) continues to face "enormous" challenges.

President of the CCAS, Clive Landis, said they still needed greater support. He said the workshop they were currently hosting had operational costs of US$100 000 but a further $50 000 was required to bring all the interested parties to the workshops.

Another problem was moving around the region. Landis said all their workshops have thus far been in Barbados with attempts to go into Jamaica and Guyana proving unsuccessful due to economic issues.

He was speaking to the Press Tuesday at Hilton Barbados during a coffee break at the third CCAS Caribbean International HIV workshop, dubbed, Sustainability, Networks And Opportunities In The Fight Against AIDS.

"The CCAS is really there to ensure HIV laboratory management is brought up to standard in the Caribbean.

"You cannot treat an AIDS patient properly unless you see how he is standing up to the disease, so proper HIV management depends on a laboratory," he said.

Landis said the Caribbean was woefully deficient in this regard and their job was to fight the spread of the disease through the use of technology.

He added that the purpose of the workshop was to provide a solid teaching base to delegates from around the region and allow them to see the full range of machines used, and how they operated.

The workshop opened on Sunday and ends tomorrow.

So far, delegates have discussed the fundamentals of a healthy immune system; how this is degraded in HIV/AIDS and how such degradation can be monitored by CD4 flowcytometry in adults and children.

The emphases Tuesday were on viral load determination and HIV resistance testing and an answer to the important question: "How can we make this more affordable and simplify the transfer into better patient care?"

Landis said a recent fundamental breakthrough involved the emergence of portable machines which could be used without any technical training.

"70 per cent of all AIDS sufferers are described as rural but all the laboratory centres are urban. Now a rural doctor or clinic can run the CD4 test," he said.

The CD4 and CD4 percentage tests are performed on adults and children respectively to test for HIV/AIDS infection.

For more information see the CCAS website: www.caribcas.com. (CA)