Quality assurance of malaria rapid diagnostic tests used for routine patient care in rural Tanzania: microscopy versus real-time polymerase chain reaction.

Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends parasitologic confirmation of suspected malaria cases before treatment. Due to the limited availability of quality microscopy services, this recommendation has become scalable following increased use of antigen-detecting malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) in many malaria-endemic countries. This study was carried out to monitor quality of RDT performance in selected health facilities using two quality assurance (QA) methods: reference microscopy and detection of parasite DNA by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) on dried blood spots (DBS).