2016 · The Pediatric infectious disease journal · paywalled
Identifying Gaps in Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV: A Case Series of HIV-positive Infants in Zambia
Bonawitz et al.
The finding, in our words
A review of the Zambian National Dried Blood Spot Registry identified 17 HIV-positive infants among 459 tested by DBS DNA PCR across five facilities, yielding a transmission rate of 3.7 per cent. Programmatic risk factors for mother-to-child transmission included late antenatal care presentation, home delivery, maternal refusal of treatment and loss to follow-up, underscoring the role of DBS-based infant screening in exposing service gaps as Zambia scaled up lifelong combination ART for pregnant women.
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.