**1. Introduction**

In Africa, fever is the most common symptom leading patients to seek health care [1,2]. Fever of unknown origin has long served as an entry point for the treatment of malaria [3]. With encouraging gains in malaria control in Sub-Saharan African countries, the incidence of this disease is in decline, leading to a decreasing proportion of febrile illness attributable to malaria. Between 2000 and 2013, malaria mortality rates decreased by 47% globally, and by 54% in sub-Saharan Africa—the region most a ffected by the disease—whereas the proportion of patients presenting with non-malaria febrile illness (NMFI) increased, respectively [4]. Acute febrile episodes are caused by various bacterial and viral pathogens, and infections with these agents result in patients presenting with malaria-like symptoms [5]. Although resulting in a higher mortality than malaria, NMFIs are not being reliably

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diagnosed due to the lack of accurate, rapid and a ffordable diagnostic tests, and also due to poor access to diagnostics facilities in many resource-poor endemic settings [1,6,7]. The objective of this study was to determine potential arboviral etiologies of NMFI in children in a low resource setting, using mobile recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA)—a real-time isothermal amplification technique [8]. For this purpose, we conducted a prospective arbovirus investigation in children seeking healthcare, at a health centre in the Dakar suburb of Medina Gounass, during a period of six months—from September 2015 to March 2016. The mobile suitcase laboratory has also been successfully used for Ebola virus detection [9].

## **2. Materials and Methods**
