Strengths and limitations
This is the first comprehensive study that compares the operational costs between the most-used FEC methods in STH surveys. It is important to note that the estimated costs are institute- and context-specific, and hence the reported values should not be interpreted as absolute. However, a major strength of our framework is that assumptions about costs can be easily adapted to represent particular settings. Because our framework aims to compare different survey designs and diagnostic methods, we do not consider costs that can be reasonably assumed to be the similar across different survey designs and different FEC methods: salary for senior staff to supervise the field activities, report, and analyze the data; power supplies; laboratory rent; per diems for days when work is not possible (e.g., weekends); time required for the field team to travel to and return from the study location at the start and end of the survey; and time required to set up and clean laboratories and inform schools and local health authorities prior to surveys. In addition, we do not consider the time required to travel to new another study location if the target sample size cannot be reached in single site, meaning that some of the larger recommended survey designs (e.g., for 