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Correspondence

Kirk A. Aleck, David J. Pettitt AND Peter H. Bennett

Our suggestion that results reported by Aaskov et al. might be the result of "laboratory or other error" was based on two considerations. First, as 368 pairs of sera from umbilical cords of infants and their mothers were gathered over a period of 2.5 months from a hospital in Fiji, at all hours of the day and night and not necessarily by the authors themselves, our experience suggests that labeling or transposition error in the hospital or laboratory in a few instances is a possibility. This needs to be considered as a possible explanation, at least as likely as that suggested by Dr. Aaskov, for the apparent absence of antibody in a mother when it was present in an infant.

A second source of error might be related to the rate of false positives in the indirect immunofluorescence procedure in which sera were tested at a dilution of 1:5 to detect Ross River IgM antibody.