High Prevalence of Unconfirmed Positive HIV PCR Test Results among African Infants with HIV Exposure in the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) Consortium

James G Carlucci; Thomas Huntington; Karl-Günter Technau; Marcel Yotebieng; Valériane Leroy; Kim Anderson; Madeleine Amorissani-Folquet; Kara Wools-Kaloustian; Andrew Edmonds

doi:10.1093/cid/ciae251

High Prevalence of Unconfirmed Positive HIV PCR Test Results among African Infants with HIV Exposure in the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) Consortium

Clin Infect Dis. 2024 May 14:ciae251. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciae251. Online ahead of print.

Authors

James G Carlucci¹, Thomas Huntington², Karl-Günter Technau³, Marcel Yotebieng⁴, Valériane Leroy⁵, Kim Anderson⁶, Madeleine Amorissani-Folquet⁷, Kara Wools-Kaloustian⁸, Andrew Edmonds⁹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Pediatrics, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, USA.
² Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, USA.
³ Empilweni Services and Research Unit, Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital, Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
⁴ Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, USA.
⁵ CERPOP, SPHERE, Inserm, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
⁶ Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research, School of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
⁷ University Houphouet-Boigny, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.
⁸ Department of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, USA.
⁹ The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA.

PMID: 38742844
DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciae251

Abstract

In a large, multi-regional cohort of African infants with HIV exposure, 44% of those with a positive HIV PCR lacked a confirmatory positive test. Efforts are needed to ensure high-fidelity implementation of HIV testing algorithms, so that all positive results are confirmed thereby reducing the risk of potentially false-positive results.

Keywords: Africa; Confirmatory Testing; HIV; Infant; Polymerase Chain Reaction.

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