Evaluation of routine anti-HBc screening of volunteer blood donors: a questionable surrogate test for non-A, non-B hepatitis.

Routine antibody to hepatitis B core antigen (anti-HBc) screening, recommended as a surrogate test to identify potential carriers of non-A, non-B hepatitis, was evaluated on 22,346 blood donors using currently available enzyme immunoassay (EIA) reagents. Of the 2 percent found reactive, the majority had cutoff-to-sample absorbance ratios less than 2.0 and less than one-half had anti-HBc when tested by a radioimmunoassay (RIA) method. Only one of 2877 units donated previously by the reactive donors was implicated in a transfusion associated hepatitis case. These results raise questions about the use of currently available anti-HBc reagents as a surrogate test for non-A, non-B hepatitis.