Pooling of samples for seroepidemiological surveillance of human T-cell lymphotropic virus types I and II

We evaluated a straight forward pooling strategy for antibody screening of HTLV-I/II, using panels of sera from various parts of the world including a total of 43 HTLV-I and 54 HTLV-II positive specimens. Four antibody screening assays were included in the evaluation: the HTLV-I/II GE 80/81 (Murex Diagnostics), the HTLV-I/HTLV-II Ab Capture ELISA (Ortho Diagnostics), the HTLV-I/II ELISA 3.0 (Genelabs Diagnostics) and the Serodia HTLV-I (Fujirebio). The Murex and Ortho assays represent a new generation of HTLV screening tests with a sandwich format incorporating both HTLV-I and HTLV-II synthetic and/or recombinant peptide antigens. The Genelabs assay is an indirect ELISA with recombinant HTLV-I and -II antigens and Serodia is a particle agglutionation assay with HTLV-I whole viral lysate. Each HTLV-positive sample was included in pools of 1/1 up to 1/16, in two-fold steps made in normal HTLV-negative blood donor serum from one up to nine donors. For HTLV-I, with the exception of one false negative sample in dilution 1/16 with Genelabs ELISA, all assays were positive at all dilutions. The Murex assay had absorbance values at maximum levels for all samples at all dilutions. The other assays had gradually decreasing absorbance values although clearly above cut-off. For HTLV-II, the Murex assay correctly detected all samples to dilution 1/16 despite gradually decreasing signals. The Serodia assay had 100% sensitivity to dilution 1/4 while at 1/8 and 1/16 it decreased 82 and 80%, respectively. The Genelabs ELISA had gradually decreasing sensitivity for HTLV-II from 98 (1/1) to 33% (1/16) while the Ortho assay detected all specimens at all dilutions in a limited set of samples tested. Taken together, this evaluation has shown that pooling of samples may be an appropriate strategy for serosurveillance of HTLV. It is, however, crucial to limit the number of samples and to choose assays that allow the dilution caused by the pooling. Using the best performing assays in this evaluation for pools of e.g. five samples would leave a reasonable safety margin.