Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the rise of the mobile laboratory in global health and examines the ways in which that mobility is premised on the capacity to compress laboratory infrastructures into small-scale containers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the rise of the mobile laboratory in global health and examines the ways in which that mobility is premised on the capacity to compress laboratory infrastructures into small-scale containers. In 2008 funding for the rollout of 4,800,000 malaria rapid diagnostic tests across Papua New Guinea was awarded by the Global Fund to accompany a new Arthemisinin Combined Therapy (ACT) treatment protocol for malaria. By 2011 the RDTs had not arrived in the country. By 2013 their presence at rural health centres remained patchy. Rapid Diagnostic Tests encapsulated in a small plastic cassette the size of a fist are designed to travel to places where the distributed infrastructure of laboratories, microscopes and expertise does not reach. Yet in PNG those tests often failed to move. If laboratories have historically been configured as spaces of containment and control, the mobile laboratory turns our attention to the ways in which they are also contained, or encompassed, by the worlds they seek to test. When health systems rely on the movement of small things across expansive, rugged landscapes, new kinds of relationships between the internalities and externalities of diagnosis come into view.