Poor performance characteristics of conventional PCR in detection of respiratory syncytial virus-experience of a tertiary care centre in Southern India.

ABSTRACT

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a significant cause of contagious acute respiratory infections in children and older adults. Since there are contradictory reports regarding the efficacy of different methods to detect RSV, we evaluated the performance of the conventional PCR versus real‑time PCR in 222 patients with acute respiratory infections (ARI) recruited between January 2012 and March 2013. Conventional PCR had a very poor sensitivity of 40% (95% CI 19.2-63.9%) and failed to detect RSV in respiratory samples with low viral load. Thus, it may be prudent to replace it with real‑time PCR to achieve precise diagnosis.