Also, researchers need to develop tests to detect the disease more quickly and new drugs to treat it, experts say.
The reason, health officials say, is that countries have not invested enough to build, equip and staff laboratories to detect the disease.
Pap tests, which can detect the disease, are the only type of routine cancer screening encouraged for all women at a young age.
For hepatitis C, for instance, the older test cannot detect the disease during the first 70 days after infection.
Because scientists now have the whole genome of the virus, they can use what are known as primers, or bits of genetic material from the virus, to detect the disease in patients.
Dr. DeHaven said the department's testing was "not to provide public safety," but to give officials 95percentt certainty that they would eventually detect the disease if it appeared in one animal in a million.
Across Europe there have been studies into sudden death in athletes and in Italy there is already a screening programme under way, where footballers are given simple heart tests to help detect the disease.
The chemicals are undetectable to the human nose, but can be used to detect the disease much earlier than the traditional method of using a microscope to find parasites in blood.
They are confronting a problem of the new era of Alzheimer's research: The ability to detect the disease has leapt far ahead of treatments.
The finding could lead to the development of more sensitive tests for Alzheimer's, based on analysis of correspondence or diary entries, to detect the disease early.
Health officials at the organization said that scientists had found a virus that could be the cause of SARS, which has eluded even sophisticated laboratory tests, and added that if the research continued to go well, a test to detect the disease could soon be developed.
