BackgroundThe emergence of different viral infections during the last decades like dengue, West Nile, SARS, chikungunya, MERS-CoV, Ebola, Zika and Yellow Fever raised some questions on quickness and reliability of laboratory diagnostic tests for verification of suspected cases. Since sampling of blood requires medically trained personal and comprises some risks for the patient as well as for the health care personal, the sampling by non-invasive methods (e.g. saliva and/ or urine) might be a very valuable alternative for investigating a diseased patient.Main bodyTo analyse the usefulness of alternative non­invasive samples for the diagnosis of emerging infectious viral diseases, a literature search was performed on PubMed for alternative sampling for these viral infections. In total, 711 papers of potential relevance were found, of which we have included 128 in this review.ConclusionsConsidering the experience using non-invasive sampling for the diagnostic of emerging viral diseases, it seems important to perform an investigation using alternative samples for routine diagnostics. Moreover, during an outbreak situation, evaluation of appropriate sampling and further processing for laboratory analysis on various diagnostic platforms are very crucial. This will help to achieve optimal diagnostic results for a good and reliable case identification.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12879-018-3611-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Changes in lifestyle, travel, and migration, as well as other factors such as climate change and terrorism have increased the vulnerability of the human population to imported, rare, and emerging infections. Numerous virus outbreaks have occurred in recent years, such as Ebola haemorrhagic fever in Democratic Republic of Congo (1995, 2001-2003), Uganda (2000) and Gabon (2001-2003), West Nile fever in the United States since 1999, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China in 2002, Chikungunya in the Indian Ocean and India since 2004/2005, and, most recently, avian influenza.

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