Passive Haemagglutination Test for Antibodies Against Rabies Virus

All the procedures now available for the measurement of rabies virus antibodies in serum have certain disadvantages. The serum neutralization test (SN), whether carried out by assay in mice or by the plaque-reduction technique, requires several days before the titrations are completed, necessitates special facilities for keeping large numbers of animals and tissue-culture plates, and is relatively expensive. A complement-fixation test is very insensitive, giving low titres in comparison with SN tests, and a haemagglutination-inhibition procedure is complicated by the presence of nonspecific reactions. A rabies passive haemagglutination technique (RPHA), developed to overcome many of these problems, is described.Titres obtained with human sera by the RPHA procedure correlated well with those obtained by SN tests. Both IgG and IgM classes of antibodies were measured by the RPHA procedure; however, it appeared to be more sensitive for detecting IgM than was the SN test and, therefore, gave higher titres for this class of immunoglobulins.