The performance of hepatitis C virus (HCV) antibody point‐of‐care tests on oral fluid or whole blood and dried blood spot testing for HCV serology and viral load among individuals at higher risk for HCV in South Africa

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: To enhance screening and diagnosis in those at‐risk of hepatitis C virus (HCV), efficient and improved sampling and testing is required. We investigated the performance of point‐of‐care (POC) tests and dried blood spots (DBS) for HCV antibody and HCV RNA quantification in individuals at higher risk for HCV (people who use and inject drugs, sex workers and men who have sex with men) in seven South African cities. METHODS: Samples were screened on the OraQuick HCV POC test (471 whole blood and 218 oral fluid); 218 whole blood and DBS paired samples were evaluated on the ARCHITECT HCV antibody (Abbott) and HCV viral load (COBAS Ampliprep/COBAS TaqMan version 2) assays. For HCV RNA quantification, 107 dB were analyzed with and without normalization coefficients. RESULTS: POC on either whole blood or oral fluid showed an overall sensitivity of 98.5% (95% CI 97.4‐99.5), specificity of 98.2% (95% CI 98.8‐100) and accuracy of 98.4% (95% CI 96.5‐99.3). On the antibody immunoassay, DBS showed a sensitivity of 96.0% (95% CI 93.4‐98.6), specificity of 97% (95% CI 94.8‐99.3) and accuracy of 96.3% (95% CI 93.8‐98.8). A strong correlation (R (2) = 0.90) between viral load measurements for DBS and plasma samples was observed. After normalization, DBS viral load results showed an improved bias from 0.5 to 0.16 log10 IU/mL. CONCLUSION: The POC test performed sufficiently well to be used for HCV screening in at‐risk populations. DBS for diagnosis and quantification was accurate and should be considered as an alternative sample to test. POC and DBS can help scale up hepatitis services in the country, in light of our elimination goals.