Accurate diagnosis of urogenital schistosomiasis is crucial for disease surveillance and control. Routine diagnostic methods, however, lack sensitivity when assessing patients with low levels of infection still able to maintain pathogen transmission. Therefore, there is a need for highly sensitive diagnostic tools that can be used at the point-of-care in endemic areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Accurate diagnosis of urogenital schistosomiasis is vital for surveillance and control programmes. While a number of diagnostic techniques are available there is a need for simple, rapid and highly sensitive point-of-need (PON) tests in areas where infection prevalence and intensity are low. Recombinase Polymerase Amplification (RPA) is a sensitive isothermal molecular diagnostic technology that is rapid, portable and has been used at the PON for several pathogens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFollowing publication of the original article [1], the authors flagged that unfortunately an error had been introduced to the Conclusions section of the article's Abstract, during production of the article.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Urine filtration and microhaematuria reagent strips are basic standard diagnostic methods to detect urogenital schistosomiasis. We assessed their accuracy for the diagnosis of light intensity infections with Schistosoma haematobium as they occur in individuals living in Zanzibar, an area targeted for interruption of transmission.
Methods: Urine samples were collected from children and adults in surveys conducted annually in Zanzibar from 2013 through 2016 and examined with the urine filtration method to count S.