Presence of hepatitis B and C viral genomes in US blood donors as detected by polymerase chain reaction amplification.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) represents a major cause of posttransfusion hepatitis worldwide. Posttransfusion hepatitis associated with hepatitis B virus (HBV) continues to occur. HBsAg-negative donor sera from the Rhode Island Blood Center between 1987 and 1988 were screened using more sensitive techniques to assess the prevalence of low level HBV infection. Group I consists of 866 healthy blood donors without HBV serologic markers, group II consists of 377 donors with ALT elevations (> 45 IU/L), group II consists of 148 donors positive for anti-HBc, and group IV consists of eight donors positive for both surrogate markers. A sensitive monoclonal immunoradiometric assay (M-IRMA) was employed for detection of HBsAg-associated epitopes (detection limit of 20 pg/ml) in serum. A subset of sera were analyzed for the presence of HBV DNA using the method of anti-HBs capture of HBV related virions in serum followed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. Using these techniques, 0.8% and 1.7% of donors were positive for HBsAg and HBV DNA respectively in group I. In contrast, 0.9% and 9.5% in group II and 0.7% and 18.1% in group III were positive, respectively. There were eight donors with both ALT elevation and anti-HBc; and four (50%) of these were positive for HBV DNA. In the group with anti-HBc, the majority (80%) of donors with HBV DNA had either no or low (signal to noise ratio < 10) anti-HBs titer. Using anti-HCV testing and reverse transcription-PCR for detection of HCV genomes, we detected evidence of HCV infection in nine of the 49 donors with low level HBV DNA.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)