Low risk of contamination with automated and manual excision of dried blood spots for HIV DNA PCR testing in the routine laboratory

In low resource settings the inability to diagnose HIV in infants early presents a major obstacle to providing care for HIV-infected children. Dried blood spot samples offer a solution to the scarcity of skills available for venesecting young infants but pose challenges to laboratories because their processing requirements are distinct from that of the liquid blood samples widely used for viral detection assays. Different methods of excising 287 paired HIV-positive and HIV-negative dried blood spot samples (n = 574) for testing by the Roche Amplicor™ HIV-1 DNA assay version 1.5 were assessed. A manual punch in conjunction with three different cleaning protocols (n = 372) and an automated punch (BSD 1000 GenePunch) using a single cleaning protocol (n = 202) was assessed for the risk of cross contamination between samples. A single false positive result obtained using the automated punch may have been attributable to contamination during the excision step of the assay. Excision of dried blood spot samples is associated with a very low risk of cross contamination regardless of the instrument or cleaning intervention used. The process of excising dried blood spot samples should not compromise the results of HIV viral detection assays performed on dried blood spots in routine laboratories which is encouraging for increasing access to an accurate diagnosis of HIV in infants.