Long before Melbourne’s first COVID-19 lockdown hit, Blake Atmaja and his housemates had already learned how to self-isolate.
A year earlier, one of his housemates came home with news he never could have anticipated: he’d been diagnosed with scabies and Blake had likely contracted it too.
“It was scary, the feeling of not knowing what the next steps were, not knowing where to go from there,” he said.
In the following days, the telltale scabies rash emerged on his body, accompanied by a frantic itch.
“I had itches in between the fingers on my hands,” he said.
“And you can’t really itch them because it feels like you’re just going to make it worse, but it’s just so uncomfortable.”
Despite sounding like an illness from another era, scabies very much persists today.
“I didn’t think it would happen to me, I didn’t think it would happen to my friends,” Blake said.
“It can happen to you. It can happen to anyone.”
Scabies is a microscopic mite that burrows under the skin to lay eggs, affecting more than 400 million people each year according to the World Health Organization.
In recent years, scabies outbreaks have been recorded in hospitals, aged care homes and prisons around Australia.
Last year, a scabies outbreak spread from Wollongong Hospital to three other nearby New South Wales hospitals, leading to what the health district described as one of its biggest single public health responses.
Blake and his housemates spent weeks deep cleaning their share house, social distancing and treating their skin with ointment to clear the infestation.
But in communities with poor access to health care, scabies can go unchecked and cause life-threatening bacterial infections, as well as the potentially fatal rheumatic heart disease.
Scabies skin swab trials in the NT
Currently, doctors diagnose scabies by looking for a skin rash or sending a scraping of the skin to a lab where the mite can be seen under a microscope.
But that process is lengthy and not always accurate, according to researchers at Melbourne biotech firm ZiP Diagnostics.
“With the current method of diagnosis, patients have to wait days to weeks to receive a result,” senior scientist Hannah Nguyen said.
“In addition to that unfortunately diagnosis by microscope only achieves around 50 per cent accuracy.”
ZiP Diagnostics has teamed up with the Northern Territory’s Menzies School of Health Research to develop a world-first scabies diagnostic device they hope can help prevent serious disease.
The new tool involves swabbing the skin and running the sample through a portable machine that tests for the presence of scabies DNA, much like the PCR tests used to diagnose COVID-19.
Menzies researchers are now trialling the device in the Northern Territory, where scabies is a serious public health concern.
Paediatrician Joshua Francis said scabies spreads more in remote communities with high levels of overcrowding and limited access to health care, disproportionately affecting First Nations people.
The research team hopes the device can also test for the staphylococcus and streptococcus bacteria that can enter open wounds caused by itching scabies.
“Kids will grow up getting exposed to strep infections multiple times during their childhoods, and scabies is part of that,” Dr Francis said.
“So if you’re getting scabies a lot and you’re scratching away at that, it really increases your risk of getting rheumatic fever or rheumatic heart disease.”
