Diagnostic performance of rapid diagnostic tests versus blood smears for malaria in US clinical practice.

Background: Approximately 4 million US travelers to developing countries are ill enough to seek health care, with 1500 malaria cases reported in the United States annually. The diagnosis of malaria is frequently delayed because of the time required to prepare malaria blood films and lack of technical expertise. An easy, reliable rapid diagnostic test (RDT) with high sensitivity and negative predictive value (NPV), particularly for Plasmodium falciparum, would be clinically useful.

Evaluation of malaria screening in newly arrived refugees to the United States by microscopy and rapid antigen capture enzyme assay.

Before an empiric malaria treatment program, >60% of Liberian refugees had malaria on arrival to Minnesota. We compared microscopy with rapid antigen testing for detecting asymptomatic parasitemia. Nine of 103 (8.

A study of results generated using the Abbott LCx-GC assay fails to reveal a performance-based rationale for the 2002 level 1 recall.

To establish the effect of a quality control failure on the performance of the LCx-GC nucleic-acid amplification assay for Neisseria gonorrhoeae (Abbott Laboratories, Abbott Park, IL) in the field, we conducted a retrospective analysis comparing the clinical and analytic performance of the recalled lots with those not implicated in the recall. Our analysis revealed no statistically significant differences between recalled lots (n = 8,686 tests) and nonrecalled lots (n = 8,699 tests) with respect to multiple parameters of assay performance, including frequency distribution of patient results (P = .575), prevalence of indeterminate results (P = .