Performance of Latex agglutination, ELISA and RT-PCR for diagnosis of Rotavirus infection

The rotavirus is one of the major factors of inducing the acute gastroenteritis infection in children under 5 years of age. The laboratory diagnosis is progress and bringing it under control as well as avoiding its diffusion. The purpose of the present study was to determine the performance of enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and Latex agglutination (LA) tests against reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for evaluating the children’s acute gastroenteritis by rotavirus. One hundred feces specimens were collected from February to May 2014 and analyzed by LA, ELISA and RT-PCR. In this study, the positive results for rotavirus detected by ELISA, LA and RT-PCR were 37, 43 and 27%, respectively. In addition, the result showed that the sensitivity and specificity of ELISA and LA were 74 and 85%, respectively, when compared to RT-PCR. For laboratory detection of Rotavirus infection, RT-PCR has the highest sensitivity and specificity but because of the high costs, ELISA and LA based kits with good performance, as shown by this study, can be preferred for the routine use.