Jan 24, 2016 10:17 AM EST By Rashmi Kalia, UniversityHerald Reporter

Researchers at Duke University are conducting research to devise a blood test that can determine if a illness is bacterial or viral, and whether medicine is necessary, News Quench reports.  

The newly devised test uses only a few drops of blood and analyzes genes, narrowing down the cause of the illness and determining whether antibiotics should be used.

 "A respiratory infection is one of the most common reasons people come to the doctor," said lead author Ephraim L. Tsalik, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at Duke and emergency medicine provider at the Durham VA Medical Center, according to Health Newsline.

"We use a lot of information to make a diagnosis, but there's not an efficient or highly accurate way to determine whether the infection is bacterial or viral. About three-fourths of patients end up on antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection despite the fact that the majority have viral infections. There are risks to excess antibiotic use, both to the patient and to public health."

He added that determining whether infections were bacterial or viral was difficult.

Tsalik, Woods and their team described the observational study in the January 20 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

There is already a blood test that can determine whether infections are bacterial or viral.  However, the new test in the works at Duke are more efficient, according to Modern Readers.  

 "Considering the huge vacuum and the void in helping doctors make decisions about antibiotic use, just about any kind of test is an improvement over what's currently available," said Tsalik.

The researchers hope that they can take down the current testing time of 10 hours of the new blood test to one hour.

"What we're reporting now is by no means the end of the story," said Tsalik. "We are working diligently to translate the signatures we found to make them available in an hour or less using a simple approach that can be done at the patient's bedside or in an office-based lab."

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