Just a little info: Everything you ever wanted to know about Ebola PCR testing. This is highly technical, dry and boring, so I included some highlights from the summary. I am sure youll all find this comforting ;-) : However, the data presented here also illustrate the drawback of the reliance on any single diagnostic assay alone, including the RT-PCR assay, for EHF diagnosis. The most serious shortcoming of the RT-PCR assay is the greater ease with which false positives and false negatives can be generated. Because of the serious potential for false positives and negatives, we do not rely solely on a single diagnostic test but instead on a collection of tests that together establish a laboratory diagnosis. For instance, sole reliance on the first RT-PCR assay (using the Filo A and B primers) used in the beginning phase of the outbreak would have led to the initial misclassification of 19 of 46 samples. The false negatives could have resulted for a number of reasons, which include but are not limited to inhibitor contamination of the RNA preps, a low copy number of the target sequence (particularly in the first days after the onset of symptoms in nonfatal cases), and nucleotide mismatches between primer and target sequences that are a result of the unique genetic identity of the particular ebolavirus strain. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC374287/
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 02:49:20 +0000
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