Importancia de las pruebas específicas e inespecíficas para el diagnóstico de sífilis en donantes de sangre

in order to improve the laboratory diagnosis of syphilis as an infectious and contagious disease in blood donors, we performed this study to determine the reliability of the specific: enzyme immunoassay (elisa) and immune-chromatography (ic) tests, the unspecific: venereal disease research laboratory (vdrl) test and the unheated serum regain (usr) serologic tests to rule out syphilis from blood donors of the dr adolfo pons hospital in maracaibo, zulia state. we analyzed 481 sera from apparently healthy blood donors, male and female, 18 to 60 years of ages. from the samples analyzed by elisa 10 were positive (2.07%) and 8 (1.66%) by ic. vdrl detected 4 (0.82%) reactive sera and usr just 2 (0.421%). we concluded that elisa with vdrl are the safest and more reliable tests to rule out syphilis from blood donors, since they gave in parallel reliable results to assure the quality of blood to be transfused.