Prevalence of Human T-Lymphotropic Virus (HTLV) Antibodies Among the Donor Population in the State of Qatar

Abstract

To determine the prevalence of antibodies to HTLV-1 & II among the donor population in Qatar and to evaluate the relevance of continuing routine pretransfusion screening of all donations for HTLV-I& II we surveyed all the results of the screening tests performed on 124,266 donations collected in the period August 1991 to the end of January 2004. All donations were screened by ELISA based assays and all donors who tested positive were recalled for repeat ELISA testing and confirmatory testing by Western-Blot (WB). Two hundred and sixty nine donors tested positive for HTLV-I/HTLV-II antibodies by ELISA but only 81 donors could be retrieved for confirmatory testing. On repeat ELISA testing 27 donors gave negative reactions; the remaining 54 were still positive and were tested by WB. Of those, 22 were confirmed positive by WB, 20 were WB negative while the remaining 12 donors gave an indeterminate WB pattern. Only one of the 22 W-B confirmed positive was a Qatari national The remaining 21 were non-Qatari donors belonging to various nationalities.