Evaluation of routine anti‐HBc screening of volunteer blood donors: a questionable surrogate test for non‐A, non‐B hepatitis

Abstract

Routine antibody to hepatitis B core antigen (anti‐HBc) screening, recommended as a surrogate test to identify potential carriers of non‐ A, non‐B hepatitis, was evaluated on 22,346 blood donors using currently available enzyme immunoassay (EIA) reagents. Of the 2 percent found reactive, the majority had cutoff‐to‐sample absorbance ratios < 2.0 and < one‐half had anti‐HBc when tested by a radioimmunoassay (RIA) method. Only one of 2877 units donated previously by the reactive donors was implicated in a transfusion associated hepatitis case. These results raise questions about the use of currently available anti‐HBc reagents as a surrogate test for non‐A, non‐B hepatitis.