Sera from 225 patients who 20 years earlier had been infected with endemic syphilis and adequately treated with penicillin (PAM 4.8-6 megaunits) at various stages of the disease, were investigated for serological reactivity by the fluorescent treponemal antibody absorption (FTA-ABS), treponemal haemagglutination, and Venereal Diseases Research Laboratory tests. Specific antibodies were found in...

Hepatitis-B surface antigen was found in 58% of 64 patients with cirrhosis in Iraq using counter immunoelectrophoresis (CIE), radioimmunoassay (RIA), and three commercial haemagglutination tests--Auscell (Abbott Laboratories), Hepatest (Wellcome Reagents Ltd.), and Hepanosticon (Organon Teknika). CIE detected about half as many positives as the other methods; RIA was the most sensitive. The num...

Reverse passive haemagglutination, a novel microtitre based assay, was compared with the Streptex (Wellcome UK) latex slide agglutination kit for streptococcal grouping in a diagnostic microbiology laboratory. Three hundred and fifty two extracts from 349 consecutive primary isolation plates were assayed by both methods. Reverse passive haemagglutination gave identical grouping results for 98.0...

Background and Aims: Adventitious agents, especially viral agents are among the most important concerns in viral vaccines. Viral contamination of biological products may arise from the original source of the reagents such as, serum, trypsin, animal or human derived media components or cell culture and working seed or cross contamination of vaccine during production. In this study, adventitious ...

Complement fixation tests were performed on sera from 18 patients with achalasia and 12 age- and sex-matched controls against a number of bacterial and viral agents in an attempt to ascertain any association with previous infection or any evidence of an altered immune response. There was a statistically significant increase of antibody titre against measles virus in the sera of 21 patients with...

In this study we have investigated five quantitative and three semi-quantitative rheumatoid factor assays and the Rose-Waaler assay in 120 patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and in 76 with other systemic diseases. All tests measure the IgM anti-IgG antibodies. The correlations between the quantitative tests were all higher than 0.86 and much better than between the quantitative and se...

In order to determine whether pregnancy influences the specificity of the fluorescent treponemal antibody absorption (FTA-ABS) and Treponema palidum haemagglutination assay (TPHA) tests, these tests, together with the quantitative fluorescent treponemal antibody (FTA) and Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) tests, were carried out simultaneously on 2000 pregnant women who attended for c...

The serological tests for rheumatoid serum factors fall into two categories, in which rabbit antibody and human gamma globulin respectively provide the reactant. Clinically, the chief use of these tests for serum antiglobulin factors is to assist diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, and serum titres above given levels are commonly regarded as "positive". In most tests the "positive" level has bee...