Previous studies had demonstrated that the conventional silica adsorption method was capable of detecting a single infected S. damnosum s.l. (the major African vector of onchocerciasis) fly in a pool containing up to 99 uninfected flies [7] . To determine if the performance of the oligonucleotide capture assay was similar when applied to S. damnosum s.l., the spiking experiments were repeated employing pools containing 200 S. damnosum s.l. heads or bodies. All spiked pools were found to be positive ( Table 2 ), suggesting that the capture assay preformed equally well on both African and Latin American vectors of onchocerciasis.