Publications by authors named "N Hsiao"
Article Synopsis
- * A study in Cape Town, South Africa showed seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 rose from 39.19% in July 2020 to 67.8% by November 2021, with poorer communities experiencing higher rates and mortality.
- * Seropositivity before the Omicron wave offered strong protection against severe disease, suggesting that effective seroprevalence research is essential for understanding true infection rates and directing public health interventions.
Background: Pretreatment of HIV drug resistance among children living with HIV (CLHIV) can compromise antiretroviral therapy (ART) effectiveness. Resistance may be transmitted directly from mothers or acquired following exposure to antiretrovirals consumed through breastfeeding or administered as prophylaxis.
Methods: We performed resistance testing in children aged <3 years, newly diagnosed with HIV in Western Cape, South Africa (2021-2022), who either (1) acquired HIV via possible breastfeeding transmission from mothers who received ART (any regimen) during pregnancy/postpartum and/or (2) were exposed to protease inhibitors or integrase strand transfer inhibitors (INSTIs) in utero.
Background: Understanding factors that impact HIV viral load (VL) accuracy in resource-limited settings is key to quality improvement.
Objective: We evaluated whether testing delay and specimen storage between 25 °C and 30 °C before testing affected results.
Methods: Between November 2019 and June 2023, 249 individuals on antiretroviral therapy, or with newly diagnosed HIV, were recruited from clinics in Cape Town and Gqeberha, South Africa, and three plasma preparation tubes were collected.
The SARS-CoV-2 genome occupies a unique place in infection biology - it is the most highly sequenced genome on earth (making up over 20% of public sequencing datasets) with fine scale information on sampling date and geography, and has been subject to unprecedented intense analysis. As a result, these phylogenetic data are an incredibly valuable resource for science and public health. However, the vast majority of the data was sequenced by tiling amplicons across the full genome, with amplicon schemes that changed over the pandemic as mutations in the viral genome interacted with primer binding sites.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The emergence of genetic variants of SARS-CoV-2 was associated with changing epidemiological characteristics throughout coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in population-based studies. Individual-level data on the clinical characteristics of infection with different SARS-CoV-2 variants in African countries is less well documented.
Objectives: To describe the evolving clinical differences observed with the various SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and compare the Omicron-driven wave in infections to the previous Delta-driven wave.