Experience of Anti-HCV antibody immunoblot test in Korean Blood Donors.
- Author:
Heung Bum OH
1
;
Yoo Sung HWANG
;
Youn Jung CHO
;
Doo Sung KIM
;
Sang In KIM
Author Information
1. Research Institute for Blood Transfusion, The Republic of Korea National Red Cross, Seoul, Korea.
- Publication Type:Original Article
- Keywords:
Anti-HCV antibody;
Immunoblot test;
Blood donors
- MeSH:
Blood Donors*;
Humans;
Immunoenzyme Techniques;
Korea;
Red Cross;
Tissue Donors
- From:Korean Journal of Blood Transfusion
1997;8(1):1-8
- CountryRepublic of Korea
- Language:Korean
-
Abstract:
BACKGROUND: All donated bloods collected by the Korean Red Cross Blood Centers are tested for anti-HCV (Hepatitis C Virus) antibody by enzyme immunoassay (EIA) kits made in Korea. EIA test has sustaining problem of false positivity in spite of great progress in manufacturing kits. So, many healthy donors have been reported as being infected with HCV and excluded from next donation. METHODS: Among blood samples of 2,040,151 donors which were tested by two kinds of EIA kits (DONG-A HCV 3.0 and LG HCD 3.0) from 16 blood centers during 12 months, repeatably reactive samples, total 6,851 samples, were supplementally tested by LG HCD CONFIRM immunoblot test. RESULTS: Positive, indeterminate and negative rate in immunoblot tests were 39%, 9%, and 12% respectively among 6,851 repeatably reactive samples. Estimated true positive rate of anti-HCV antibody in Korean blood donors was 0.13%, showing geographical difference between 0.03% and 0.46%. Of EIA repeatably reactive samples, 28% showed greater than 5 signal to cutoff (S/C) ratio and most of them (94%) was revealed to be positive. CONCLUSION: True positive rate of EIA test results is so low that it would be necessary to increase the confidence of such results by immunoblot tests.
