Evaluation of a commercial latex agglutination test for detecting antibodies to cytomegalovirus in organ donors and transplant recipients.

A commercial latex agglutination test was evaluated for use in detecting CMV antibody in organ donors and transplant recipients. When compared with indirect and competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) and complement fixation tests (CFT), the test gave concordant results with 96.6% of sera. The latex agglutination test was more sensitive than CFT but less sensitive than ELISA. The major advantage of the latex agglutination test was its simplicity and rapidity. Taking only 8 min to perform, it is very suitable for testing sera from organ donors, since the time available for such tests is short because of the finite ischaemic time, particularly for liver and heart transplantation.