Exhibition Stands News
HIV test accuracy ''impacted by diversity of strains''
11 Feb 2009
Due to the increasing prevalence of genetically-divergent strains of the HIV virus, the capacity of clinicians to monitor the progress of drug therapies depends on the abilities of viral load assays to measure these new variants, it has been suggested.
Research by the Global HIV Surveillance Programme at Abbot was presented at the 16th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
Using the Abbot RealTime HIV-1 test and the Roche COBAS Taqman HIV-1 test, specimens infected with HIV were tested.
"The Abbott RealTime HIV assay quantitated HIV more accurately than the widely used COBAS Taqman assay in an analysis of 317 seropositive samples from seven countries," Abbot stated.
Countries involved in the study were Argentina, South Africa, Thailand, Brazil, Cameroon, Saudi Arabia and Uganda.
In recent weeks, Abbot Nutrition announced it is not affected by the expansion of Peanut Corporation of America''s recent recall of products, adding it has already withdrawn all its ZonePerfect Chocolate Peanut Butter, Nutripals Peanut Butter Chocolate and Peanut Toffee bars.
