The incidence of hemagglutinins to monkey erythrocytes was surveyed in over 1,000 sera from normal, non-IH liver disease and IH disease donors. It was confirmed that there is no significant difference in incidence or titer of warm or cold agglutinins that would distinguish infectious hepatitis from control specimens. In a second phase of this study, methods for inactivating the non-specific agglutinins (NSA) were developed in order to determine if the NSA masked a disease-specific agglutinin. It was then found that approximately 35% of acute IH or SH specimens did contain a masked agglutinin in contrast to approximately 8% of control specimens. Attempts are in progress to increase the sensitivity of the test to masked agglutinins and to neutral¬ize them with convalescent serum.
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