Van Den Heuvel, Annelies
Smet, Hilde
Prat, Irena
Sands, Anita
Urassa, Willy
Fransen, Katrien
Crucitti, Tania
Funding for this research was provided by:
World Health Organization (PO201153656)
Article History
Received: 10 June 2018
Accepted: 29 November 2018
First Online: 3 January 2019
Ethics approval and consent to participate
: The WHO HIV evaluation panels were established years ago, before the stringent regulations. All the specimen are anonymized. The STI panels were collected on remnant specimens of patients tested for routine STI in the HIV/STI clinic. All patients at the ITM clinic signed an active informed consent stating that they allowed their coded biospecimens to be retained and used for future research (together with [medical] data). This process is written in SOPs approved by our internal IRB (Institutional review board) in agreement with the ethics committee of the University Hospital in Antwerp, Belgium. No extra individual approval should be submitted for each of the WHO evaluations on existing panels as all ethical regulations are followed.
: Not applicable.
: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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