Analysis of the sex ratio of reported gonorrhoea incidence in Shenzhen, China

Xiong, Mingzhou; Lan, Lina; Feng, Tiejian; Zhao, Guanglu; Wang, Feng; Hong, Fuchang; Wu, Xiaobing; Zhang, Chunlai; Wen, Lizhang; Liu, Aizhong; Best, John McCulloch; Tang, Weiming

An inaccurate reported gonorrhoea incidence sex ratio, generated by an inaccurate reported gonorrhoea incidence, may mislead the gonorrhoea prevention policy to target the wrong population for NG screening. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of influence factors in the clinical diagnosis and the reporting process on the reported gonorrhoea incidence sex ratio has not as yet been quantified. It is helpful to find the weakness of disease surveillance system by identifying the influence factors of sex ratio. Thus, we designed and applied a patient survey questionnaire to collect information for gender and sociodemographic characteristics, and collected reporting data of gonorrhoea cases. Furthermore, we performed NG testing on all participants to ascertain gonorrhoea diagnosis. We used rates of untested patients, true-positive rate, false-negative rate and unreported rate to quantify the accuracy of the reported gonorrhoea incidence during diagnosis and the reporting process. Finally, we calculated and compared the reported gonorrhoea incidence sex ratio with the true diagnosis sex ratio, and devised strategies to resolve these discrepancies.