Building resources to meet evolving laboratory medicine challenges in Africa

Two brief reports in this issue spotlight intersections between communicable and non-communicable disease. Nabaigwa et al.1 report on urinary tract infections in diabetic patients at a Ugandan hospital, where they found hyperglycaemia associated with urinary tract infections, and Ashaka et al.2 describe anaemia of likely infectious origin: human parvovirus B19. As these reports illustrate, disease, as we know it, has become more complicated. Each patient will likely be best served by multiple tests performed in different laboratory medicine departments in order to get the most informative description of his or her disease. At no time before now has laboratory medicine been so central to healthcare delivery.