Eligibility criteria
We included the publications that reported primary data related to HSV-2
for any of the four outcomes (1) seroprevalence, which was defined by
the proportion of the included population who tested HSV-2 seropositive;
(2) seroincidence or seroconversion, defined as the occurrence of HSV-2
infections per person-time; (3) the proportion of genital ulcer disease
(GUD) cases in which HSV-2 was isolated as its cause; (4) the proportion
of genital herpes cases in which HSV-2 was isolated as its cause.
We excluded case reports, case series, commentaries, reviews, and
publications without access to the full text. We also excluded the
studies that involved less than 10 participants. Those studies reporting
HSV-related outcomes (including both HSV-1 and HSV-2) were excluded if
we could not extract HSV-2 outcomes. If one study only reported HSV-2
prevalence from infants younger than six months, we excluded it due to
the parental source antibody.20