Contribution of molecular diagnosis to congenital toxoplasmosis.

We evaluated the performance of three real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays on 73 samples from mothers and children with congenital toxoplasmosis. PCR assays had significantly higher sensitivity in prenatal period than in birth period when targeting the 529-bp repeat element (81.3% versus 36.0%) or the B1 gene (64.6% versus 20.0%).