One guess I have about theranos , is that they are going to radically change healthcare in Africa. Why ?<p>Well let's start with the fact that the main thing preventing labs-on-chip devices transforming Africa today is business reasons - its just not seen as a good investment by western companies.<p>But what's unique about theranos is that it is owned by Holmes ,which seems very idealistic(as her main motivation here ) , and her father worked for years helping African healthcare .<p>So I think Holmes will use the strong business it will build in the west to create and extremely low cost African healthcare .That also explains why she has advisors like foreign state secretary and why bill gates is very impressed with her.
The biggest problem with mass testing are the false positives. When you're testing 100 million people even a low false positive rate of 0.1% will still mean that 100 000 people will think they're sick when they're not. I once even saw an example where they calculated that when everybody did an HIV test most positives actually would be false positives.
I didn't realize that Walgreens is already doing Theranos tests.<p><a href="http://www.walgreens.com/storelocator/find.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.walgreens.com/storelocator/find.jsp</a><p>What tests do they perform? Is this something that we should be doing yearly?<p>[update] fixed typo