Exploration of a simplified clinical examination for scabies to support public health decision-making

Abstract

Introduction: In most settings, the diagnosis of scabies is reliant on time-consuming and potentially intrusive clinical examination of all accesible regions of skin. With the recent recognition of scabies as a neglected tropical disease by the World Health Organization there is a need for standardised approaches to disease mapping to define populations likely to benefit from intervention, and to measure the impact of interventions. Development and validation of simplified approaches to diagnose scabies would facilitate these efforts. Methods: We utilised data from three population-based surveys of scabies. We classified each individual as having scabies absent or present overall, based on w..