You don’t need a flu test to diagnose the flu! But there are situations where rapid antigen testing or PCR is valuable. Listen to this episode of PEM Currents, the Pediatric Emergency Medicine podcast, to learn more about the test characteristics of common assays and when to obtain testing when prevalence rates for the flu are high.
Check out the companion post (basically show notes) on PEMBlog.
Follow me on Twitter @PEMTweets
References
CDC: Rapid Diagnostic Testing for Influenza
CDC: Guidance for Clinicians on the Use of RT-PCR and Other Molecular Assays for Diagnosis of Influenza Virus Infection
Silvennoinen H, Peltola V, Lehtinen P, VainionpääR, Heikkinen T. Clinical presentation of influenza in unselected children treated as outpatients. Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2009;28(5):372.
Merckx J, Wali R, Schiller I, Caya C, Gore GC, Chartrand C, Dendukuri N, Papenburg J. Diagnostic Accuracy of Novel and Traditional Rapid Tests for Influenza Infection Compared With Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Ann Intern Med. 2017 Sep 19;167(6):394-409. doi: 10.7326/M17-0848. Epub 2017 Sep 5.
Mansour et al. Comparative Cost Analysis Between PCR Testing and DFA Testing for Diagnosing Respiratory Virus Infections. American Journal of Clinical Pathology, Volume 144, Issue suppl_2, 1 October 2015, Pages A209.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:35 — 9.9MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts |
2 replies on “Testing for Influenza”
Notify me of new postcast
Absolutely – I signed you up for email notifications. Thanks for listening!