True incidence of hepatitis. C virus infection in Serpositive Blood Donors

Abstract

The antibody to HCV core antigen ELISA test system has been shown to have high sensitivity and specificity; allowing it to be used in the screening of blood don:!tions. Our experience has also shown that the test is easy to use; which together with low cost of the kit; mean it can be used to analyze i11dividual blood donations and solve organizational problems connected with pool analysis. It is therefore a valid altemative to nucleic acid amplification technology (NAT) - based tests for identification of HCV infection in the diagnostic window period; specially in situations in which organizational technological problems connected with pool analysis are difficult to solve (e.g; in countries not able to set up nucleic acid tests). The HCV RNA test could become a useful means for improving the safety of blood and blood products and for detecting an early HCV infection in high risk individuals and late seroconveters. With the regard to sensitivity; this study showed that the HCV Ab tests ability to detect the virus is comparable to that of PCR. The finding of 1 00% positive HCV Ab but PCR mean for all donors in this study is 94. 92 %. The finding of some HCV Ab- positive and HCV -RNA- negative samples was not entirely unexpected considering the high sensitivity of NAT­ based tests.