High yield of retrospective active case finding for leprosy in Comoros

A customized app in Open Data Kit (ODK) was used for data collection. Besides sociodemographic and clinical data, the app allows recording the geographic coordinates of the household and scanning the barcodes and entering screening results for each individual. Additional approval for publication was obtained from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM), Antwerp (Approval number: 1541/21). [...]30 new leprosy cases were identified among the self-presenting neighborhood contacts as well as 6 additional new cases among their household contacts (Fig 1). In such high prevalence zones, even repeated (e.g., annual or biannual) door-to-door screening could be considered until clear signs of decline are demonstrated (e.g., until no more children are found among newly diagnosed leprosy cases). Since household contacts clearly are at extremely high risk, postexposure prophylaxis is strongly recommended [9].