Acceptability and feasibility of testing for HIV infection at birth and linkage to care in rural and urban Zambia: a cross-sectional study
Sutcliffe et al.
The finding, in our words
Birth testing for HIV using dried blood spots proved acceptable in Zambia, with low maternal refusal. Yet centralised laboratory testing created operational challenges: result return varied from 51.6% to 92.1% across sites, and linkage to care for infected infants was incomplete, underscoring the need for point-of-care platforms to accelerate diagnosis and treatment.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
The study found low SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity in unvaccinated children and young adults in British Columbia, with higher rates in South Asian participants and young infants. Many infections were undetected, highlighting the value of patient-centric microsampling for more accurate, decentralised surveillance.
In a Ugandan cohort, 96% of participants successfully collected at least 16 of 24 requested at-home dried blood spots, with strong correlation (R=0.93) between parasite RNA detected in self-collected spots and venous blood. The method was well tolerated, indicating self-collected DBS can reliably support decentralised malaria surveillance in endemic settings.
The study validated a commercial ELISA for measuring measles-specific IgG in capillary dried blood spots from children, finding 100% sensitivity and 96.8% specificity against matched venous serum with 92% overall agreement, then applied the method to 1,588 field-collected samples in Mexico and Nicaragua. The procedure was acceptable to surveyors and participants, showing that dried blood spots are a feasible and accurate means of assessing population immunity to measles in low-resource settings.
In a pilot mixed-methods study of youth with HIV, mailed HemaSpot-HF kits enabled home-based dried blood spot collection that participants found feasible and acceptable, supporting remote viral load monitoring and a self-management model for decentralised care.