Comparison of the BD Veritor System for Flu A plus B with the Alere BinaxNOW Influenza A&B Card for Detection of Influenza A and B Viruses in Respiratory Specimens from Pediatric Patients

The performance characteristics of two commercially available rapid tests for influenza, the BD Veritor System for Flu A+B (BD) and the Alere BinaxNOW influenza A&B card (BN), were evaluated using 200 frozen clinical specimens collected from January 2011 to June 2012 from pediatric patients. Real-time reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) was used as the gold standard to evaluate the results obtained by the two different assays. Of the 200 specimens tested, real-time RT-PCR assay detected influenza A or B virus in 116 samples, while BD detected 104 samples and BN detected 84 samples as positive. The overall sensitivity and specificity for detection of both influenza A and B virus in comparison to those of real-time RT-PCR were 89.6% (95% confidence interval [CI], 82.2 to 94.3) and 98.8% (95% CI, 92.6 to 99.9) for BD Veritor and 72.4% (95% CI, 63.2 to 80.0) and 100% (95% CI, 94.5 to 100.0) for BinaxNOW. Workflow analysis indicated that overall processing times for a batch size of 10 specimens were virtually identical between both systems. Overall, these results indicate that the BD Veritor assay was more sensitive than the BinaxNOW assay in detection of influenza A and B viruses in respiratory specimens from pediatric patients.