Hepatitis A seroprevalence in public school children in Campos dos Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil, prior to the introduction of the hepatitis A universal childhood vaccination
Kury et al.
The finding, in our words
Dried blood spot sampling of 919 school-aged children in a field setting identified low hepatitis A endemicity (20.7% seroprevalence overall) but very high susceptibility in children under five (94.7%). This shows DBS can enable decentralised infectious disease screening in paediatric populations without requiring venous blood draws.
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.
Among 1242 asymptomatic children in a remote Congolese district, dried blood spot sampling identified 53% as Plasmodium falciparum-positive. No validated artemisinin-resistance mutations were found, but a lumefantrine-susceptibility marker was present in 15% of samples, demonstrating that community-based microsampling can generate actionable resistance surveillance data to guide decentralised malaria treatment strategies.
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.
The study found that congenital cytomegalovirus infection is significantly associated with asymmetric bilateral and profound sensorineural hearing loss in children, based on retrospective analysis of dried blood spot testing. This supports the use of decentralised microsampling for early identification of at-risk children, enabling timely intervention.
In British Columbia, finger-prick dried blood spots had 97% specificity and 79% sensitivity for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in unvaccinated groups, rising to 97 to 100% after vaccination, against serum; limited to one jurisdiction, the results support decentralised serosurveillance with self-collected dried blood spots.