Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Clinical round-up
  1. Lewis Haddow1,
  2. Sophie Herbert2
  1. 1Centre for Sexual Health and HIV Research, University College London, London, UK
  2. 2The Ashwood Centre, St Mary's Hospital, Kettering, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Lewis Haddow, Infection & Population Health, University College London, Centre for Sexual Health & HIV Research, 4th floor, Mortimer Market Centre, Capper Street, London WC1E 6JB, UK; lewis.haddow{at}ucl.ac.uk

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Reducing the undiagnosed fractions of HIV and hepatitis C

A recent article looked at different strategies for identifying undiagnosed hepatitis C virus (HCV), most of which did not work.1 A screening approach, randomly sampling over 5000 people registered with primary care teams in Catalonia, resulted in a 4% response rate. After sending 200 letters per week for 8 months, one new case of HCV was identified. A second approach involved placing posters and leaflets in clinics. This attracted around 70 people to test from a target population of 20 000, and also identified one new case of HCV. The third approach used laboratory records to target people with raised transaminases and unknown HCV antibody status and invite them for testing. This strategy identified 291 individuals at risk, of whom two were new HCV-positive cases. From these results, population-based screening approaches do not seem useful. The third strategy, which also had a low yield overall, was simply a structured approach to following up on unexplained abnormal laboratory test results. Reducing the undiagnosed fraction of HCV remains a …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Contributors Both authors contributed to the identification of studies and writing of the manuscript. LH wrote the first draft.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.