In just a little over a month, the measles outbreak linked to Disneyland in California erupted across 14 states and into Mexico, infecting over 100 people. The outbreak of what was considered a disease eradicated in the U.S. is attributed to pockets of low immunization rates among children.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says measles is one of the most contagious human diseases – so contagious that if one person has it, 90 percent of the people close to that person who are not immune also will become infected. The virus can linger in the air for up to an hour.

Slowing the pace of a measles outbreak requires prompt identification of who has measles, vaccinating them if they are not too young or immunocompromised, and making sure they don’t unknowingly transmit the disease to susceptible contacts, that is, people who are not immunized or who have not had measles.

So disease detectives in states where measles cases popped up scrambled to find those who might have passed through the same locations as someone who was infected — at schools, grocery stores, malls, gyms, airports, trains and other places where large numbers of people intermingle. Signs have been posted in stores, and schools have sent letters home to alert parent of children who may have been exposed.

Today’s diagnostic technologies are a major barrier to swiftly identifying who is infected, says Ralph Tripp, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine. Confirming a measles infection or immunity currently requires taking a blood sample and sending it off to a qualified laboratory for processing, which can take days.

Tripp and Yiping Zhao, professor of physics in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and director of UGA’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, are developing a new technology for rapid detection of the measles virus in human clinical specimens – at the point of care, and in minutes rather than days. Argent Diagnostics, an early-stage startup company in UGA’s business incubator, is working to commercialize the technology using grant funding obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.