Usefulness of dried blood spot samples for monitoring hepatitis C treatment outcome and reinfection among people who inject drugs in a test-and-treat program.

DBS samples are useful to assess cure and differentiate reinfection from relapse after HCV antiviral treatment in the real world, facilitating decentralization of treatment and post-treatment follow-up in PWID. However, a fraction of patients presented with low viral loads, limiting viremia detection and genotyping in DBS and, therefore, repeat testing is recommended. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.