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Bulletin of the World Health Organization logoLink to Bulletin of the World Health Organization
. 1991;69(6):753–760.

Comparative evaluation of 36 commercial assays for detecting antibodies to HIV.

I Van Kerckhoven 1, G Vercauteren 1, P Piot 1, G van der Groen 1
PMCID: PMC2393330  PMID: 1786625

Abstract

Summarized are the results of an assessment of the major operational characteristics of 36 commercially available assays for detection of antibodies to human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and/or type 2 (HIV-2). For this purpose, 20 enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs), 11 simple immunoassays with visual reading, four supplemental assays, and one discriminatory assay were assessed using a panel of 537 sera (65% of which were of African, 26% of European, and 9% of South American origin); the prevalence of HIV-1 was 39.1% and of HIV-2, 15.7%. The following operational parameters of the assays were investigated: ease of performance; suitability for use in small blood collection centres; sensitivity and specificity; positive predictive values at different prevalences; inter-reader variability for simple assays whose results were read visually; the proportion of indeterminate results; and, for some of the ELISA assays, delta-values, as quantitative measures of sensitivity and specificity. The results will be of use to health policy decision-makers, managers of national AIDS prevention and control programmes, directors of blood banks, and laboratory specialists in the selection of appropriate HIV antibody assays.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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