Development of a High Sensitivity and Specificity Test for the Diagnosis of Congenital Syphilis
diagnosis of syphilis; smart device; syphilis; treponemal test.
Over the past few years, the resurgence of the epidemic of syphilis has required the development and adoption of new strategies for diagnosis and efficient treatment of infected patients, especially among pregnant or childbearing women. Among the immunological screening methods used to establish the diagnosis of syphilis, VDRL is able to identify the presence of anti-cardiolipin antibodies present in the sample, being one of the most widely used non-treponemal methods worldwide. Although widely used, this technique has several technical gaps that allow the establishment of false negative and false positive results, compromising the conduct adopted after the test result. Based on this problem, the present work proposes the development of a new smart device for the diagnosis of congenital syphilis that will not allow false negative or false positive results since it directly investigates the presence of the bacteria (from the identification of its DNA sequence) in blood sample analyzed, a high sensitivity, specificity and low cost treponemal test capable of being incorporated into the Brazilian primary care network.