Low concordance between QIAreach QuantiFERON-TB, a novel interferon-gamma release assay, and QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus, in a population-based survey in Blantyre, Malawi.

Unlabelled: Urgent improvements in the diagnosis and management of infection are required to reach End TB goals. Conventional interferon-gamma release assays (IGRAs), such as QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus (QFT-Plus), require substantial laboratory infrastructure and large blood volumes, limiting use in high-burden settings. The QIAreach QuantiFERON-TB (QIAreach QFT) was developed to overcome these challenges but has not previously been evaluated in field conditions in a low-income, high-burden country, or at scale in children.

Service quality in decentralized community-based Covid-19 antigen rapid diagnostic testing programmes in the Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria.

Introduction: Decentralized COVID-19 testing with antigen rapid diagnostic tests (Ag-RDT) is recommended by the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control for community-level services. These services have been provided in Primary Healthcare Centers, Community Pharmacies, and licensed "Patent Medicine Stores" that serve the least affluent communities. To support quality assurance, we applied an adapted version of SPI-RT (Stepwise Process for Improving the Quality of HIV Rapid and Recency Testing) to sites providing COVID-19-RDTs in Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria.

High resolution mapping of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter in Great Britain (2003-2021) with multi-stage data reconstruction and ensemble machine learning methods.

In this contribution, we applied a multi-stage machine learning (ML) framework to map daily values of nitrogen dioxide (NO) and particulate matter (PM and PM) at a 1 km resolution over Great Britain for the period 2003-2021. The process combined ground monitoring observations, satellite-derived products, climate reanalyses and chemical transport model datasets, and traffic and land-use data. Each feature was harmonized to 1 km resolution and extracted at monitoring sites.

Tuberculosis Immunoreactivity Surveillance in Malawi (Timasamala)-A protocol for a cross-sectional Mycobacterium tuberculosis immunoreactivity survey in Blantyre, Malawi.

Tuberculosis (TB) transmission and prevalence are dynamic over time, and heterogeneous within populations. Public health programmes therefore require up-to-date, accurate epidemiological data to appropriately allocate resources, target interventions, and track progress towards End TB goals. Current methods of TB surveillance often rely on case notifications, which are biased by access to healthcare, and TB disease prevalence surveys, which are highly resource-intensive, requiring many tens of thousands of people to be tested to identify high-risk groups or capture trends.