A prospective analysis of clinical and parasitological outcomes after treatment or a wait-and-see approach of Dientamoeba fragilis infection in an adult general practice population.

Purpose: Dientamoeba fragilis is a protozoan frequently encountered in stool samples globally. It is debated whether Dientamoeba fragilis carries pathogenic capacities. This study prospectively analyses clinical and parasitological outcomes after treatment or a wait-and-see approach of Dientamoeba fragilis infection in a general practice adult population.

Performance of a novel melting curve-based qPCR assay for malaria parasites in routine clinical practice in non-endemic setting.

Background: High-quality malaria diagnosis is essential for effective treatment and clinical disease management. Microscopy and rapid diagnostic tests are the conventional methods performed as first-line malaria diagnostics in non-endemic countries. However, these methods lack the characteristic to detect very low parasitaemia, and accurate identification of the Plasmodium species can be difficult.

Clinical Sensitivity, Specificity and Epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 Serological Testing Using the Biozek COVID-19 Test.

Background: Clinical validation using the Biozek COVID-19 test including sensitivity and specificity and associated patient-reported symptoms with SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity.

Methods: 316 sera were analyzed including 47 hospitalized cases, 50 mild cases and 219 negative controls. Results were read visually by two technicians and in case of discrepancy by a third.

Malaria diagnosis in a malaria non-endemic high-resource country: high variation of diagnostic strategy in clinical laboratories in the Netherlands.

Background: Microscopic examination of thick and thin blood films is the gold standard in current guidelines for the diagnosis of malaria, but guidelines do not uniformly agree on which combination of other methods should be used and when.

Methods: Three questionnaires were sent between March 2018 and September 2019 to laboratories subscribing to the external quality assessment scheme for the diagnosis of blood and intestinal parasites of the Dutch Foundation for Quality Assessment in Medical Laboratories in order to investigate how much variation in the laboratory diagnosis of malaria between different clinical laboratories is present in the Netherlands.

Results: The questionnaires were partially or fully completed by 67 of 77 (87%) laboratories.