Targeted point-of-care HIV testing at birth for newborns at high risk of vertical transmission in Botswana: a prospective cohort study
Ajibola et al.
The finding, in our words
Targeted point-of-care HIV screening using dried blood spots in high- and moderate-risk neonates identified 14 infected infants (0.5%) within a median of 22 hours after birth, enabling rapid initiation of treatment. Follow-up testing at six weeks revealed only three additional infections among infants who tested negative at birth.
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.
Luzolo Khote et al., Malaria journal (paywalled) · source ↗
In a population newborn screening programme using dried blood spots, eye abnormalities attributable to congenital cytomegalovirus were found in only 0.58% of positive infants and were entirely absent in asymptomatic cases. This indicates that universal ophthalmic examination for all screen-detected infants is not routinely necessary and supports targeted referrals for symptomatic cases.
DBS PCR detected congenital CMV with 86% sensitivity and 99.5% specificity in 80 infected newborns, with higher sensitivity for moderate-to-severe disease (93%) than mild disease (78%). The authors caution that wide confidence intervals limit direct extrapolation to universal screening of asymptomatic infants.
Kfoury et al., JAMA otolaryngology-- head & neck surgery (paywalled) · source ↗
In a cohort of young children in Kenya, dried blood spot microneutralisation assays showed that two doses of novel oral poliovirus vaccine type 2 induced an immune response in 62% of participants, rising from a baseline seropositivity of 19% to 72%.