ABSTRACT
A strong laboratory infrastructure to perform diagnostic testing is necessary to make and confirm clinical diagnoses as well as conduct disease surveillance to stem potential epidemics. Barriers to defining illness in resource-limited regions are vast, and patients are often given a presumptive diagnosis of infection based solely on clinical findings for well-recognized syndromes. This practice frequently leads to misdiagnosis with failure to treat alternative diagnoses, causing worse outcomes and increased mortality (1–5). In particular, syndromes with a viral etiology are rarely diagnosed because in the absence of laboratory confirmation, few epidemiologic data exist to define their disease prevalence that could support the development of clinical algorithms based on syndromic diagnosis. For this reason, building laboratory capacity in resource-limited regions has become a focal point in the fight to prevent and reduce infectious diseases (5–9).
