الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and syphilis count less than 1 percent of total Egyptian population. The costs of screening blood supplies in blood banks are high. ELISA protocol for pooling serum is simple, for more clarification, the sera from five individuals can be pooled and tested the pool using a single test. If the seroprevalence of HIV is low, then there is a high probability that all five sera in the pool are HIV negative. If outcome of pool is positive, then all five sera would need to be tested individually. WHO recommends the use of the serum pooling method in case of HIV infection, when the prevalence of disease is less than 2%, and with a maximum pooling of 5 sera.
This study aimed at investigating pooled sera for HIV and syphilis in blood donors compared to their individual sera in order to assess the cost effectiveness of this method. In the current study, 75 sera which included 10 positive HIV sera, 5 positive syphilis sera and 60 negative sera (for both) of blood donors were screened using HIV Ag-Ab and syphilis total antibody by ELISA method. Screening protocols were done by two sequential steps: first, samples in pools of five were screened for both HIV and syphilis then, positive pools were individually retested by ELISA method again.
The current study showed that there was no significant difference between mean individual sample ratio and pooled sera ratio and also between mean individual samples OD and pooled sera OD for both positive HIV and syphilis cases (p value>0.05). Regarding the numbers of positive results, there was no difference between individual sera and their pools for both HIV and