women attending a genitourinary medicine clinic. T vaginalis infection was diagnosed in 42 (11%) women. The sensitivities ofboth the latex agglutination test and the ELISA were 95% compared with 74% for microscopy and 76% for culture. The latex test was specific and showed no cross reaction with a wide range of other genital tract infections. The latex agglutination test can detect antigen in b...

A total of 163 stool specimens were tested for detection of Clostridium difficile and its toxin by cytotoxicity assay with tissue culture, latex agglutination test, and isolation of the organism. From 33 specimens which were positive for toxin by cytotoxicity, 30 were positive by the latex agglutination test; the organism was isolated from 21. The total number of samples which were positive wit...

The performance of a direct sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for detecting Aspergillus galactomannan was compared with that of the Pastorex Aspergillus antigen latex agglutination (LA) test by using 532 serum samples from 61 patients at risk for invasive aspergillosis. The ELISA gave positive results earlier in the course of infection than did the LA test. A sensitivity of 70%...

women attending a genitourinary medicine clinic. T vaginalis infection was diagnosed in 42 (11%) women. The sensitivities ofboth the latex agglutination test and the ELISA were 95% compared with 74% for microscopy and 76% for culture. The latex test was specific and showed no cross reaction with a wide range of other genital tract infections. The latex agglutination test can detect antigen in b...

A therapeutic anti-rabies immunoglobulin for human use has been produced mainly in horses. The presently available seroneutralization test, the rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT), is laborious and rather difficult to carry out in horse farms. This study was undertaken to develop a simple latex agglutination test (LAT) for determining rabies antibodies in horse sera. LAT was validat...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the prediction of the postpartum onset of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS Two thousand five hundred and forty seven healthy pregnant subjects were examined prospectively and the relation between serum rheumatoid factors (RF) and postpartum onset of RA was observed. Rheumatoid factors were measured in early pregnancy by the antihuman IgG latex agglutination test (La...

A latex enzyme immunoassay (LEIA) for detecting IgG class antibody to rubella virus was compared with the latex agglutination test (LA) and a haemagglutination inhibition assay (HI). Of 243 sera tested, four discrepant results were observed among all three techniques, corresponding to borderline values. Except for one sample containing specific IgM class antibody, the difference between quantit...

The bentonite flocculation test of Bozicevich, Bunim, Freund, and Ward (1958), the latex fixation test of Singer and Plotz (1956), and the "RA-test" (a latex reagent for use as a slide test) of Hyland Laboratories have been compared with each other and with a modified Rose-Waaler test, the behaviour of which has been previously extensively investigated. In these tests sera from 2,250 patients w...

The exact nature of the "rheumatoid factor" is unknown, but it appears to be an antibody-like substance composed of a gamma globulin complex of high molecular weight. Two groups of tests have been used to detect it: the haemagglutination test and the latex-fixation or Bentonite flocculation test. In the first group the indicator consists of sheep red cells with rabbit anti-sheep haemolysin as t...

The slide agglutination test MRSA-Screen (Denka Seiken Co., Niigata, Japan) was compared with the mecA PCR ("gold standard") for the detection of methicillin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus. The MRSA-Screen test detected the penicillin-binding protein 2a (PBP2a) antigen in 87 of 90 genetically diverse methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) stock culture strains, leading to a sensitivity of ...