Background

Compared to classical surveillance based on passive case reporting, sero-surveillance actively samples serum from the population to assess the level of protection against infectious diseases. This method can be useful for many purposes, particularly to fine-tune vaccination campaigns against vaccine-preventable diseases.

Aims

We plan to set up a network of 20 provincial hospitals across the country and collect from each of them 200 residual serum samples from routine venipunctures every four months. Sample collection is age- and sex-stratified, with a great emphasis on younger age classes. The serum bank that comes out of this can be used for real-time assessment of the level of population protection and for retrospective analyses of past circulation.