Syphilis screening among female sex workers in Bangalore, India: comparison of point-of-care testing and traditional serological approaches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: We undertook a prospective evaluation of the Qualpro Syphicheck-WB rapid syphilis test to measure its diagnostic performance and utility as a point-of-care (POC) screening test among female sex workers (FSWs) in Bangalore, India. METHODS: From August 2008 to May 2009, FSWs without a laboratory-confirmed history of syphilis attending STI clinics in Bangalore underwent POC syphilis screening using finger-prick whole blood, with onsite treatment if indicated. Serum samples were collected for local laboratory offsite rapid plasma reagin (RPR) testing and reference laboratory RPR, Treponema pallidum haemagglutination assay (TPHA), and rapid syphilis testing. FSWs who participated in standard offsite RPR screening from August 2007 to May 2008 in the same clinics formed the comparison group for treatment coverage. RESULTS: Of the 1617 women who underwent POC syphilis testing, 7.4% had laboratory evidence of active syphilis with reactive RPR and TPHA, and 3.7% had an RPR titre > or = 1:8. Compared with the reference RPR and TPHA, the sensitivity and specificity of the POC syphilis test were 70.8% (95% CI 62.7 to 79.0) and 97.8% (95% CI 97.1 to 98.5). Because of the low rate of women returning for their test results after offsite RPR screening, the proportion of women with active syphilis who were appropriately treated rose from 44.8% to 68.3% with the use of POC syphilis screening (p=0.003). CONCLUSION: The Syphicheck-WB test utilising finger-prick whole blood has a relatively low sensitivity in detecting active syphilis. However, among hard-to-reach populations who may not return for follow-up treatment, POC screening with this assay could still confer an advantage over offsite RPR testing with respect to treatment coverage.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".