Abstract
HIV viral load monitoring forms an essential part of the management of patients receiving antiretroviral therapy, but transport of samples without loss of RNA integrity may be problematic in resource limited settings. The use of plasma preparation tubes (PPT) which can be centrifuged to separate cellular components before transport may provide a simple and cost-effective alternative to standard EDTA samples. We investigated whether PPT generated reliable results using the COBAS(®) AmpliPrep/COBAS(®) TaqMan(®) HIV-1 test version 2.0 (CAP/CTM HIV-1 v2.0). The mean difference between EDTA and PPT prepared samples (n=261) was acceptable (log 0.04 copies/ml, percentage similarity CV 3.53%). PPT can be used for viral load testing on the CAP/CTM HIV-1 v2.0.
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