Quality of medical laboratory services in resource-limited settings.

This report endorses the author's own views on the subject after taking up a laboratory adviser mission in Africa. Taking the example of laboratory services practice in sub-Saharan countries, it is shown that diagnosis of diseases which require the use of laboratory suffer from lapses in the quality of case-detection and case-reporting. These services lack management and an information system that limits the set up of a laboratory network at national level. An efficient health program set in resource deprived countries would then yield improvements on systems and infrastructure.