Did self-sampling improve the adherence to group B streptococci screening in pregnant women?

More than 25% of pregnant women may have vaginal or rectal colonization of Streptococcus agalactiae, known as Group B streptococcus (GBS), which is a leading infectious cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality. However, a recent case series from the Active Bacterial Core surveillance system concluded that optimal implementation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines could reduce the rate by 26e59%, with prenatal screening and intrapartum prophylaxis being the most common error types. Therefore, the attitudes and practice patterns of obstetricians related to various aspects of screening for GBS colonization, and providing intrapartum antibiotics prophylaxis against early-onset neonatal GBS infection could be several of the most important factors associated with further reduction of the GBS disease burden. The study by Ko et al in this issue of the Journal of Chinese Medical Association, entitled A questionnaire study on the acceptability of self-sampling versus screening by clinician for Group B streptococcus (GBS) investigated 327 pregnant women attending an antenatal clinic for GBS screening. The results of their study showed that in excess of 60% of pregnant women preferred screening by a healthcare worker, and only 5.6% preferred self-screening. The reasons were based on their belief that these professionals had some greater extent of knowledge, and thus might provide a more believable GBS screening procedure. In fact, these respondents were primarily worried about the accuracy of selfscreening for GBS. However, it is interesting to find that if these respondents have the opportunity to get pregnant again, nearly 70% would like to undertake self-screening for GBS screening. Additionally, nearly 60% of these respondents would also recommend to others that they do the GBS selfscreening procedures. Although the results of this study raise certain questions, based on the relative inconsistency of the study population number provided by the authors in their article (the number of participants was different in all tables), this article is interesting and worthy of further discussion. Self-sampling may be an excellent strategy to overcome the obstacle of a large scale population screening and/or healthpromoting policy. The authors provided this idea for the