Virus Culture and Real-time RT-PCR in Identifying Influenza Viruses From Influenza-like Illness Cases in Indonesia 2007-2008

Introduction: From the influenza-like illness (ILI) surveillance in Indonesia, we learned that there was disagreement between virus culture and reverse trancriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). This implies the need to evaluate whether virus culture is still a relevant method to be used in ILI surveillance.Methods: The ILI specimens obtained from 20 ILI sentinels in Indonesia in 2007-2008. Real-time RT-PCR using primers were specific for influenza A (A/H1N1, A/H3N2 and A/H5N1) and Influenza B. The sequence of these primers was provided by the CDC, Atlanta. Virus culture identification was conducted with hemagglutination and hemagglutination inhibition methods. We evaluated the percentage of concordance between positive culture results vs its RT-PCR results.Results: A number of 112 influenza positive in culture method from 4277 ILI specimens were compared with real-time RT-PCR result. There was 69.6% of virus culture result was in concordant with real-time RT-PCR result. We also found that 30.4% of positive result using real-time RT-PCR were not detectable by virus culture.Conclusion: Virus culture was still essential and considerably efficient to support real-time RT-PCR detection in ILI cases in Indonesia although the positive Influenza results by virus culture less than RT-PCR. (Health Science Indones 2011;2:92-5).