Sensitivity of hepatitis C virus rapid tests in detecting antibodies in general population

BACKGROUND Evaluation of clinical performance of the anti-hepatitis C virus (HCV) rapid tests were carried out mostly in chronic hepatitis C patients and in individuals at high risk of HCV infection. METHODS The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of OraQuick and Wantai rapid tests on archived serum samples from 1408 individuals (mean age 46, range 18-90; 65% female) recruited with a systematic sampling procedure during a general population survey. RESULTS The analysis of samples by Ortho HCV 3.0 ELISA and Cobas Taqman HCV RNA assays resulted in 69 anti-HCV antibody positive sera, including 42 HCV RNA positive (group 1) and 27 HCV RNA negative (group 2) samples. The performance of rapid tests was evaluated on the 69 anti-HCV positive (group 1+2) and 206 (OraQuick) and 198 (Wantai) anti-HCV negative sera, randomly selected from the 1339 anti-HCV negative samples. The OraQuick and Wantai rapid assays showed a sensitivity in group 1 of 92.9% and 90.5%, respectively. The sensitivity in group 2 was 40.7% and 51.9%, respectively. The anti-HCV antibodies signal/cutoff mean value was the only parameter that statistically differed between group 1 and group 2 individuals (P